What most organizations require is corporate-level, stringent process control.

Beyond the perennial concerns of profitability and competitive advantage, life science organizations have a number of responsibilities to carefully consider each day. Particularly in the area of environmental health and safety (EH&S), organizations must ensure the safety of their workers and test subjects, protect the community and environment from any hazards associated with production or development, adhere to governmental safety regulations, and maintain the integrity of their corporate brand. The complex manufacturing processes organizations have are designed to control the working environment to ensure quality production, high productivity yield, safety, compliance, and overall efficiency. However, sometimes the processes themselves are not flexible enough to guarantee these results.

Given these seemingly contradictory requirements, software vendors are developing solutions to address these issues. There are modular-based software products on the market that promise to provide organizations with this level of support. However, these products often operate within the global organization as isolated, non-integrated technical systems that do little in terms of corporate centralization and process harmonization. Such programs fall short in perhaps the most critical element of EH&S. They fail to provide a holistic, macro view inside the inner-workings of the business to help ensure internal and external standards adherence.

In the end, what matters most in the world of safety and security is that everything possible is being done to ensure overall well-being of all parties involved. When even the slightest preventable oversight or issue occurs, business reputation and even individual lives may be at risk. Organizations need to examine their global safety tracking and reporting systems frequently and make sure they are meeting current organization needs and regulatory requirements.

From: "Achieving True EH&S In Controlled Environments"