8 Checklists for 2020: A Quick Way to Check In and Level Up Your EHSQ Programs

These checklists from Intelex offer practical advice about managing aspects of safety like slips and falls and electrical hazards, help you touch base with employees during these stressful times, offer insight into your organization’s preparedness planning, provide guidance on quality issues like voice of customer and 5S, and much more!

Don’t Be Shocked – A Checklist for Electrical Safety – While the objective of protecting the safety of their employees continues to be a strong focus for employers, there still needs to be more checks in place to reduce injuries.

Embrace the New Age of Digital Learning: Training Management in the Age of COVID-19 – Learning and training is more important than ever. When the world moves quickly, sometimes in unexpected ways, we need to make sure our training can keep up and give our teams what they need to survive and thrive.

Back to Work Checklist for Mindful Leaders – While strategic vision … Read more...

Volkswagen Dieselgate and the Culture of Quality

In early 2014, the International Council on Clean Transportation began working with researchers at West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines, and Emissions (CAFEE) to follow up on reported discrepancies in the emissions of Volkswagen diesel vehicles. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) had previously subjected the vehicles to rigorous emissions testing in the laboratory, and the vehicles had all passed with no indication of any problems. The CAFEE researchers did their emissions test in the field and produced some very different results.[i]

Graphic of volkswagons polluting a city and nature

The researchers discovered that when operating in the real world, the vehicles produced emissions that fell far outside the limits allowed for diesel vehicles to be certified in the United States. After more testing, the researchers discovered a sophisticated software application that used environmental data from the vehicle, such as the absence of movement from the steering wheel, to determine when the vehicle was being … Read more...

The Space Shuttle Disasters and Quality Management

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seven crew members died, a $3 billion-dollar orbital vehicle was lost, and NASA’s Space Shuttle program was suspended for 32 months.

Graphic of a space shuttle taking off through space

The official cause of the disaster was the failure of an O-ring to prevent hot gases from leaking through the joint in the solid rocket motor during launch.[i] The Rogers Commission – the body tasked with investigating the disaster – found that the O-ring design had been a point of concern for several years prior to the disaster, but that any concerns had been either poorly communicated or ignored in favor of maintaining project delivery on-time and on-budget.[ii]

In addition to the faulty initial design of the O-rings, the Commission determined that the unusually cold temperatures at the time of the launch (conditions in which none of the … Read more...

The Culture of Quality in the Automotive Industry

Each industry will have different interpretations of the concept of Quality and how to prioritize its tenets within their own field of practice, expertise and work experience. Perhaps the best fundamental principle is the definition of Quality from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements where a requirement is a need or expectation.”

Graphic of frontline workers working at an auto plant

Automotive quality management dates to Henry Ford’s vision of a trained workforce assembling mass-produced vehicles with consistency and precision. Today, automotive quality reflects three principles:

  • Quality in Product means the ability of the vehicle to fulfil its expected functions and behavior, such as engine efficiency, product features and environmental exhaust standards.
  • Quality in Production means producing vehicles of a consistent quality standard while working within defined cost constraints.
  • Quality in Ownership relates to customer satisfaction during their ownership of the vehicle. This includes the customer experience
Read more...

What Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong: Deepwater Horizon

ISO 9000:2015 Quality Management Systems – Fundamentals and Vocabulary gives the definition of Quality as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfills a requirement.” While this broad definition might bring to mind many of the traditional Quality ideals, such as process efficiency and customer delight, perhaps less obvious are the potential costs of Quality failures and the impact they can have on the environment, a company brand, and human lives.

Graphic of the deepwater horizon polluting waters

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig leased to BP Exploration & Production from Transocean for extracting oil from the Macondo well 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, suffered a series of explosions caused by the uncontrolled flow and ignition of oil from the well onto the rig platform during exploratory drilling. Explosions, and the resulting inextinguishable fire, continued to rock the Deepwater Horizon for 36 hours, killing 11 … Read more...

5 Reasons Why SaaS is Changing EHS Software


What is SaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS) is transforming how organizations of all shapes and sizes are deploying and using software (including EHS software). The IT research firm, Gartner defines SaaS as “software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers software based on one set of common code and data definitions that is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.”

In effect, SaaS is similar to leased software maintained and hosted by the vendor that created it.

Why SaaS?

There are a number of attributes that make purchasing software in a SaaS model much more advantageous that traditional owned and on-premises enterprise software.  Here are 5 of the most important:

1. Lower cost of entry

One of the most important attributes of SaaS … Read more...