10 Steps to Take Your Safety Management System from Good to Great

Taking your EHS management system from good to great requires more than just buying a tool or paying lip service to the idea of safety. It requires a strong safety culture that integrates people, processes, and tools so that every worker is connected not only to the technology, but to their peers. Connected workers = safer workers, and that means connecting the organization as a whole to the core value of safety. 

In the new Intelex checklist 10 Steps to Take Your Safety Management System from Good to Great, EHS expert Scott Gaddis, Vice President and Global Practice Leader—Safety and Health at Intelex Technologies Inc., shows you the fundamental principles you need to build upon to make sure your EHS management system can keep your workers safe, provide business value, and provide a positive impact for your bottom line. When it comes down to it, every organization is built out of … Read more...

Four Considerations to Achieve Health and Safety Compliance

Over a series of three blogs we are going to examine how to achieve health and safety process excellence. There are three main objectives that EHS professionals must fulfill to achieve their health and safety goals: maintain compliance, anticipate and manage hazards, and improve safety culture.

Safety Compliance

This first blog is going to focus on the building blocks that create the foundation for maintaining safety compliance and engaging in continuous improvement. Some keys to achieving this objective are automating reports and document control to ensure consistency between departments and locations, tracking employee training as well as audits and corrective actions and automating compliance with various federal, state or province or local regulations.

Creating the Right Solution

Technology can assist your organization in maintaining all those records and help you ensure that your facility complies with local regulations. In fact, technology has become an essential tool in achieving process excellence … Read more...

Knowing When to Buy EHS Software

At what point does the cost of purchasing and implementing new software become preferable to the cost of maintaining your existing organizational software? It’s an important question, especially when you consider that as much as two-thirds of the cost of the new software is probably going to come from your EHS budget. Like just about anything else, software has an expected service life. For most well-designed systems, their useful life cycle can be as long as six to eight years; for systems that are less well designed or for applications that evolve very quickly, the useful life of business software can be as short as three years.

To maintain workplace safety you need a tool that will provide software solutions for a wide variety of services like compliance management, risk management, safety management, incident management, audits, document control, training management … the list goes on.

According to a 2017 survey … Read more...

Ask Enhesa Vol. 18 Intelex Special draft

Featuring contributions from Tjeerd Hendel-Blackford and Shannon Summers Enhesa; Kristen Duda and Jessica Sarnowski, Intelex  

Why do Intelex and Enhesa partner with each other? 

Enhesa and Intelex started working together back in 2013 as there were clear mutual benefits of partnering. On the one hand, Intelex is a market leading EHSQ software platform and enables clients to manage their EHS program in one central platform, including compliance with EHS laws. On the other hand, Enhesa is the global market leader in providing analysis of global EHS laws and regulations, packaged as “regulatory content.” This means there is no overlap in what both companies provide, but a lot of mutual benefits in working together to serve our mutual clients’ end goals – which is ultimately to look after the safety of their employees and the natural environment in which they operate. 

Another way to look at it is by taking the analogy of a CD or Cassette player (remember those?). In this example, Intelex … Read more...

Passing the Test: How Good Is your Safety Management System?

I talk a lot about management systems and why a good one is imperative to sustainable business success.

A management system, simply put, is the playbook in how an organization manages its moving parts to achieve its goals. The level of simplicity or even the complexity of such a system is entirely dependent on things like organization size, the business functions needing control, the business sector and even legal obligations, just to name a few.

Specific to safety, a Safety Management System (SMS) is a systematic approach to ensuring safety. What it is not is a set of rules based on regulatory standards such as OSHA or the HSE. The SMS is a collection of management elements that are identified and evaluated to develop and execute plans to gain and sustain control within a process framework. While organizations will decide what features the Safety Management System needs to control, the … Read more...

6 Reasons Why Quality Professionals Support Integrated Management Systems

On February 8, 2017, I delivered a presentation to 138 attendees on Integrated Management Systems (IMS) at the monthly ASQ Toronto section meeting. To learn more about IMS, read The Case for EHSQ Integrated Management Systems. The audience consisted of a broad range of experts including CQEs, CQAs, CQIAs, CSSGB, CSSBB, management consultants, auditors, among others.

As part of the introduction, I asked the audience how many people have either heard about or were already familiar with Integrated Management Systems and I’d say about 40% of the audience raised their hands – which is a good sign! I was actually only expecting about 10 to 20 people to raise their hands. This definitely demonstrates that Integrated Management Systems is of interest to quality management professionals.  The concept of an IMS becomes even more important because of the harmonization of standards due to the recent changes in ISO 9001:2015, ISO … Read more...

The Case for EHSQ Integrated Management Systems

Have you ever wondered if there is a better way to manage your organization’s management systems using an Integrated Management System?  Silos and disparate systems should be a thing of the past.  Between the Quality Management System (QMS), Safety Management System (SMS), and Environmental Management System (EMS), there is abundant opportunity to eliminate inefficiency and duplication of activities especially in more complex organizations with multiple business units.


To learn more, watch this webinar hosted by ASQ (American Society for Quality) where Peter-Elias Alouche discusses:

  • The importance of the customer’s perspective
  • Why businesses should integrate their management systems
  • What is an EHSQ Integrated Management System anyways?
  • What are some of the opportunities to start integrating management systems today
  • The importance of culture

Whenever you assess or improve the effectiveness of your organization’s management system(s), you need to think about your customers and what they want. It’s easy to get caught up … Read more...

Webinar: Revolutionizing Safety Performance in Oil & Gas

Achieving success and sustained compliance in oil and gas means having visibility of key performance indicators, essential measures that enable businesses to respond to changing circumstances. However, organizations too often rely on ‘lagging’ performance indicators – metrics that don’t provide the essential information you need to ensure success. Alternatively, leading indicators can enable you to achieve proactive management, continued compliance and substantial savings in time, efficiency and resources.

Leading and Lagging Indicators: Revolutionizing Safety Performance in Oil & Gas, is a free 30-minute webinar that focuses on the vast potential of leading performance indicators. Hosted by Oil and Gas solutions specialists Gurpreet Lalwani and Steve Buffett, this webinar will show you how leveraging leading and lagging indicators can revolutionize how you manage your business.

Watch this webinar and learn:

  • Leveraging leading and lagging indicators to improve overall organizational safety performance.
  • Gaining greater insight into understand your indicators and what they
Read more...

Intelex partners with airport experts to develop comprehensive FAA SMS solution

Intelex has long had a presence in the aviation and aerospace sector. It’s a presence that is about to get a lot bigger thanks to a unique alliance with two aviation experts. Intelex has partnered with SITA, a global IT provider to the air transport industry, and JDA, a leader in aviation safety, certification and compliance services, to develop a complete airport safety management solution.

This robust solution will help airports achieve complete, effortless compliance with a key regulation that has been top-of-mind for most businesses in the sector lately: the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Part 139 SMS rule, due later this year. This mandate, which will affect more than 540 commercial airports across the United States, essentially requires airports to implement a safety management system (SMS). When the mandate comes into force, airports will have about 18 to 24 months to roll out a complete SMS solution.

Get … Read more...

Nalco named one of America’s 12 safest companies

Intelex is thrilled to congratulate client Nalco Company on being included in a prestigious list of America’s 12 safest companies for 2011!

Since 2002, EHS Today has presented an annual list featuring 12 companies that have developed innovative safety solutions, boasted low injury and illness rates, and engendered a corporate culture of safety.

In addition to Nalco, which uses Intelex’s Safety Management System, the list of winners included Caterpillar Inc., ACCO Brands Corp, Honeywell and more. Drop by EHS Today for a complete list, and take a look at the article on Nalco.

The awards were handed out Monday in a ceremony that program sponsor MCR Safety calls “the Academy Awards of safety.”

EHS Today editor Sandy Smith noted that all of the winning companies had ingrained safety as a core value of their company.

Congratulations, Nalco! Keep up the great work!… Read more...