Corporate risk assessment process

Broad Principles of the Risk Assessment Process in the Corporation... 

Based upon the events cited in the preceding brief chronology, I believe there are two principles that influence the risk assessment process in corporations. 

The second principle of the risk assessment process in the corporation is that it is a staged and recycling process. 

One of the key findings of the initial review after the accident was that there was no formal, methodical safety risk assessment process. So the company set out to develop one. They decided that it needed to be a uniform and consistent methodology that could be used worldwide, across all product lines. Though product lines vary greatly, how their safety risks should be assessed needed to be very methodical and repeatable. Also, it was important that safety hazards and their associated risks must be communicated to the corporate level in a uniform and consistent manner so that risks could be compared across all operations. 

The corporate office wanted to be sure that the new safety risk assessment process would work and was sustainable. So they piloted it on various product lines in different countries. This gave the company the ability to see if similar safety risks would be identified, determine if risks were evaluated consistently, and test the applicability and ease of the tool to actual safety hazards. It was a resounding success and quickly led to the promulgation of the methodology across all operations worldwide. 

Setting up proper risk assessment procedures and applying them to the change control process markedly reduces the efforts required to keep systems in a validated state. Harmonization, standardization and efficiency can be increased by appointing a company computer validation committee per site and/or at a corporate level. Good cooperation between QA and IT is a prerequisite for keeping systems validated. 

This chapter will describe the fundamentals of a management system for OCM as well as the specific procedures and risk assessment tools needed. While the framework and procedure are developed for a corporate OCM system, the same program can be applied to smaller units within a company (e.g., division, plant, unit, or individual). A generic workflow process is described and a case study is presented to provide examples of some of the tools and steps of the OCM process. 

For example, factors that may have led to a failure to cany out a risk assessment may exist in other parts of the operation, with the result that there is a catalogue of other accidents, waiting to happen. It is possible that the accident occurred due to a failure in the process at corporate level, in which the potential for similar accidents may exist at other sites. 

Eastman Kodak has identified 10 core competencies and developed a process for their management and utilization within the company (29). Similarly, Eaton Corporation selected seven core technical competencies, ranked them in importance, assessed their importance vs the known state-of-the-art for the industry, and developed action plans to extend the life of each (30). Eaton subsequently found the company could bring to market products designed with proven building blocks, thus minimizing risk and the need for additional capital equipment. In addition, the competencies were found to be reservoirs of proprietary advantage that had not previously been put to work. 

Special Features. The DJSI corporate questionnaire is designed to assess opportunities and risks deriving from economic, environmental, and social activities of companies. Inclusion in this standard is a competitive process selection is considered a mark of distinction for companies that want investors to see them as sustainability leaders. 

Transforming a sustainability strategy into action requires thus not only the development of a practical framework aimed to identify and assess options for improving the sustainability of chemical processes and products, address issues such as risk and security, green building design, globalization and corporate responsibility [8], but also to establish reliable and robust bases to characterize the various aspects of the complex phenomenon. 

Following the announcement of the results of the UMASS-Digital Equipment Corporation study, IBM requested JHU to perform two epidemiological studies at IBM semiconductor plants. The request was for an historical cohort study and a prospective study. The objectives of the studies were to determine if. . there was an excess of adverse reproductive health effects among clean room employees, compared with employees working in other manufacturing areas or non-manufacturing environments and to determine whether any specific processes or chemicals were associated with adverse reproductive health outeomes. With this two-study approach, JHU was able to assess both current and past risks. 

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