Safety and health performance is traditionally measured by "trailing metrics" that measure injuries and illnesses after they occur. Genentech uses these standard metrics and is also increasingly focused on tracking safety and health performance through "leading metrics" that are instrumental in preventing incidents or illnesses from occurring. During 2007, new monthly safety performance reports were developed and distributed to management personnel in order to provide a more timely indication of the daily performance of their safety efforts. These reports, circulated throughout the entire company, provide personnel with several metrics, which represent the daily involvement of line management and staff in monitoring and improving safety conditions:
- The Recordable Events Ratio measures the number of
recordable injuries that have occurred in relation to the
number of first aid events. Safety theory indicates that
many first aid events occur before a more serious
recordable injury. By developing goals around this ratio,
the company is able to incentivize prompt reporting of less
serious incidents so that these incidents can be evaluated,
conditions can be improved and more serious events can
be prevented.
- The Investigation Timeliness metric measures the success
rate for line supervisors to promptly perform an initial
investigation when safety incidents occur.
- The CAPA Completion metric measures the timeliness of
completion for assigned corrective and preventive actions
after an incident has occurred.
- The Training Completion metric measures the completion status of assigned EHS training for affected employees.
These four leading metrics represent an effort to incentivize line management to deliver on their responsibility of assuring safety awareness, correcting safety problems and creating a culture of early reporting of incidents to prevent more serious events from occurring. We plan to continue reporting on the effectiveness of this leading metrics reporting technique in future reports.
Read feature stories illustrating some of Genentech's efforts in the area of incident management.
| STARI — Our New EHS Incident Management System
One important program completed during 2007 was the company-wide launch of a new EHS incident reporting system. The STARI system, which stands for System for Tracking and Reporting Incidents, is a company developed intranet-based tool available to all employees. Personnel across all of our operations are urged to report any environmental, health or safety incidents so that necessary improvements can be made to improve our performance and minimize our risks. Genentech employees use this system to report safety suggestions and near miss events. Also reported are injury and illness events, environmental issues and property damage events. When an individual enters details regarding an incident or idea, the STARI system starts a cascade of notification e-mails to inform line management and EHS staff of the event so that the issue can be properly investigated. The initial investigations lead to appropriate corrective action. From there, the incident is assessed for risk using our EHS risk assessment process, and if deemed necessary, a root cause analysis is performed and preventive actions identified, assigned and completed. The STARI system processed more than 4,000 events during 2007. The flowchart below depicts the life cycle of an EHS incident from reporting, through investigation and corrective action, risk assessment, root cause analysis and preventative action. |
EHS Incident Life Cycle
Root Cause Analysis and Preventive Actions are only required for incidents ranked as high risk, otherwise these steps are optional.