This paper was prepared for the 41st Annual American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) Professional Development Conference and Exposition to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, June 9–12, 2002. The objective of this paper is to stimulate an interactive dialogue with participants in the conference session entitled "Integrating Environmental Management with Safety and Health". The primary goal is to provide sufficient information in this paper in conjunction with the actual presentation slides and session dialogues that will offer session participants a concept on the value and implementation process for integrating environment, health and safety into a single management system.
Our process of deciding whether to integrate environment, health and safety (EHS) into one management system (MS) and the proper implementation method involved some benchmarking of other corporations. The benchmarking results provided us with valuable information and one overriding conclusion that there was no single approach to this issue that was correct for every company interested in integrating EHS into one management system. While portions or the entire approach used by Motorola may be appropriate for many companies that are different from Motorola, it would most likely benefit those companies to know some information about our company. Motorola is a global leader in providing integrated communications and embedded electronic solutions. We had revenues in 2001 of $30 billion with over 700 locations in 69 countries. We had 42 manufacturing facilities in 13 countries with activities ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to electronic equipment assembly.
Motorola's approach to EHS involves a decentralized EHS structure with centralized coordination. EHS is driven at the multiple levels of corporate, business, regional and local. Our manufacturing facilities have local EHS teams that are supported by a smaller team at the business Sector level. The Sector EHS team is coordinated by an EHS Corporate department that together have created a common EHS infrastructure, standards and management system.
Although Motorola had environment, health and safety programs in the 1980's, it wasn't until 1992 that a corporate EHS policy was formally adopted by the office of the CEO. In 1993 we established 110 corporate-wide EHS standards that applied to all worldwide manufacturing operations and implemented an internal audit program to measure our site's performance to those standards. These EHS standards were focused more on command and control measures with the underlying basis that we first comply with all local regulations and apply our corporate standards of best practices where local regulations were more relaxed or did not exist. This created a common level of EHS expectations at all of our manufacturing sites regardless of their location. This method of detailed operational standards complimented with an integrated audit process existed until January 1999 and was very successful in raising the level of our EHS performance worldwide.
