Tag: quality domain

Environment, Health and Safety and the compliance domain

Benefits of Written Rules:
Capture important learnings and assumptions
Establish a standardized, organized and reproducible, method of conducting work safely
Ensure effective transfer of knowledge to new members of the group
Require disciplined thinking to formally document thus reducing errors in processes
Create a framework for delegation of decision-making
Demonstrate the organizations commitment to safety

Chet Brandon “Tried and True: Written Procedures are a Foundation of EHS Success“

I don’t think there is a quality person who would read that list and not nod knowingly. Reading the excellent article quoted above reminded me that we all probably do EHS, Quality and compliance in general all wrong.

Yes, Health & Safety is about the employee; Quality is about the product (and legal is about following the law and finance does something about money) but what when you look at the tools we pretty much have a common tool-box. Root cause analysis, procedures, risk management, system thinking.

What is truly different is the question we ask:

  • Quality asks about the customer
  • Health and Safety asks about the employee
  • Environment asks about, well, the environment

I find it fascinating that it became environment, health and safety and most companies, as again, the question asked is rather different. In companies where care of the environment is separate (such as the energy industry) you will definitely see it as a separate entity.

I have only been at one company that was on the path of looking at quality, environment, health and safety were all similar disciplines and united them under a chief compliance officer (who was also head of legal). My current company is still struggling along the path of uniting standards and tools.

There is definitely a lot of different domain knowledge between the three, the same way quality is different between industries. However the commonalities that unite us are many and ones we should spend more time exploring.

Industry specific knowledge

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and industries contribute to the diffusion of that knowledge? Here we measure the industry-, occupation-, and location-specific knowledge carried by workers from one establishment to the next, using a dataset summarizing the individual work history for an entire country. We study pioneer firms—firms operating in an industry that was not present in a region—because the success of pioneers is the basic unit of regional economic diversification. We find that the growth and survival of pioneers increase significantly when their first hires are workers with experience in a related industry and with work experience in the same location, but not with past experience in a related occupation. We compare these results with new firms that are not pioneers and find that industry-specific knowledge is significantly more important for pioneer than for nonpioneer firms. To address endogeneity we use Bartik instruments, which leverage national fluctuations in the demand for an activity as shocks for local labor supply. The instrumental variable estimates support the finding that industry-specific knowledge is a predictor of the survival and growth of pioneer firms. These findings expand our understanding of the micromechanisms underlying regional economic diversification.

C. Jara-Figueroa, Bogang Jun, Edward L. Glaeser, and Cesar A. Hidalgo. “The role of industry-specific, occupation-specific, and location-specific knowledge in the growth and survival of new firms” PNAS December 11, 2018 115 (50) 12646-12653; published ahead of print December 10, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800475115

Interesting academic paper on industry domain knowledge that has ramifications on the pharmaceutical industry, including the quality domain.