VisiumKMS Case Study – INEOS Styrolution achieves 100% transparency wide EHS incident reporting with VisiumKMS

Companies operating on a global level have to facilitate local-level EHS performance improvements as they grow to provide a valuable reporting tool at enterprise level. VisiumKMS is such a solution and ensures that every incident, every near miss, every recommendation, corrective action and MOC is stored, managed and shared across the organisation.

The Customer 

Companies operating on a global level have to facilitate local-level EHS performance improvements as they grow to provide a valuable reporting tool at enterprise level. VisiumKMS is such a solution and ensures that every incident, every near miss, every recommendation, corrective action and MOC is stored, managed and shared across the organisation.

INEOS Styrolution (Styrolution) is a 3200 employee company that is the Global Leader in Styrenics, with manufacturing facilities in nine countries and 17 production sites. They also have six R&D centers and 24 sales offices. Their products are used in over 2000 applications across seven industries, including automotive, electronics, household, construction, healthcare, packaging, toys, sports and leisure. The Styrolution business was formed by merging three heritage companies including BASF, Styrolution and INEOS ABS.

The Business Objective

Initially, all of these facilities had different heritages and employed several different EHS management systems. Deployment of a global software solution was needed across the many sites to allow for measurable safety data reporting, analytics, and performance enhancements. The HSE impact areas for the project were management of change/permit to work, risk management, and incident management. The technologies involved in the project were data analytics/business intelligence and an EHS software platform. 

The Solution

INEOS Styrolution investigated several technology vendors including VisiumKMS, AirsWeb, Enablon, IBM Lotus Notes and IHS (now Sphera) among others. INEOS Styrolution selected VisiumKMS as the technology provider and project implementation team. The relationship streamlined communications and resulted in rapid deployment, training and an overall lower cost for implementation. 

As INEOS Styrolution was already familiar with the EHS automation marketplace, and also held expertise in their own EHS requirements, they did not consider using external consultants during their selection process. Consulting firm resources were not necessary to complete this project. The project scope, implementation and testing plans were developed through joint collaboration between internal EHS and IT personnel working with the Rolls-Royce project team. 

The approximate investment in the project was more than EUR 100,000 and less than EUR 500,000.

Innovation & Implementation 

A key innovation of this project was deploying a Global EHS management system useful at the plant level, which allowed for sharing of best practices across regions, and complying with reporting requirements for the enterprise. The synthesis of disparate EHS processes and technology into a single, integrated tool helped satisfy the various needs of different production facilities. 

Using the VisiumKMS module for incident management (IM), INEOS Styrolution created an IM global procedure shared among all production facilities that was localized and quickly configured to meet plant-level requirements in VisiumKMS. The possibility of configuration at the plant level helped ensure user acceptance rate, further supporting the overall success of project implementation. 

The IM module was configured to capture data for root cause analysis and sharing of lessons learned. The Action- Tracking module of VisiumKMS seamlessly ensured that the progress of corrective actions generated from the IM process were monitored to closure. The Action-Tracking module features a Management of Change (MOC) workflow process that could be used to simply track actions, or perform effective MOC by delegated authority for process improvements. 

Additionally, corrective actions from other areas of EHS (ie audits, HAZOPs, ISO, etc.) were uploaded into the Action-Tracking module. Because of these features, INEOS Styrolution now has the ability to track all corrective actions to closure in one system, and monitor the progress from a production unit, plant, site, region, and global perspective. In addition, audit management and risk assessment modules of VisiumKMS were also integrated into this EHS automation project. 

The Benefits

Today, VisiumKMS is being used for local EHS performance improvement and is a valuable reporting tool at the enterprise level. VisiumKMS was simple to configure and implement for all production facilities with multi-lingual capabilities. The project was implemented with virtually zero IT resources, and one primary EHS professional. Tens of thousands of incidents, near misses, recommendations, corrective actions and MOC‘s have been managed in the system. Investigation reports and lessons learned from all incidents are accessible to all KMS users on a global scale. 

• Multiple legacy systems were abandoned after implementation of VisiumKMS, which helped to reduce resource commitments for Styrolution EHS systems by 60%. 

• 100% of EHS action items are monitored to closure. 

• Overdue action EHS action items have decreased by more than 50%, down to less than 5% total actions overdue. 

• 100% transparency for enterprise-wide EHS incident reporting. 

The team at VisiumKMS are dedicated to providing our customers with the world’s best in class solutions for Environment, Health and Safety management, driving operational excellence through the delivery of mandatory continuous improvement business processes and compliance driven by software.

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