(47b) Designing and Delivering Operational Excellence

The sun-setting of our former parent company’s EHS and process safety documentation presented a unique opportunity to create a fit-for-purpose management system while raising the bar on our own performance. To those ends we embraced an Operational Excellence (OE) philosophy to ensure robust, repeatable actions and behaviors across our operations – an operating discipline consistent with our existing approach and particularly valuable under uncertainty. We embarked on a three-year transformation that ultimately created a management system that tied EHS and process safety performance to our business strategy.

To facilitate the transition, we identified a select set of guiding principles that together served as our ‘north star’ for the effort. We leveraged formal change management and governance, including executive oversight and project sponsorship. We also managed the project’s various phases with a stage-gate process that included outputs and timelines.

With these supports in place, we engaged our stakeholders in an intensive, thoughtful examination of options for standing up a fit-for-purpose OE management system. We progressed through our vision to our corporate commitments and roles, then translated these into cohesive, integrated requirements that articulated frontline requirements. Finally, we developed multiple toolsets and job aids to assist our plant managers in introducing the resulting changes.