Towards an integrated approach for monitoring environment, health and safety aspects within an organisation

Management of systems requires, amongst many other things, a thorough and continuous understanding of the actual system's state and its development trends. To do so, managers need to rely on both descriptive and explicative models of the system's strengths and weaknesses. In case of complex systems, those needs become much more difficult to achieve because of the: interconnections between different dimensions or layers of the system ; holistic properties of the system making its final performances different from the sum of its elements' performances; External, and thus uncontrolled, factors affecting the system. Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) management of technological systems threatening humans and environment fits totally this description. Therefore, as complex systems, industrial installations require the development of dedicated monitoring systems aiming to ensure that EHS management is correctly designed and implemented. The development of indicators as monitoring tools has been widely documented in literature. Nevertheless, their use is still struggling with multiple challenges: How to find an adequate balance between the need for multiple indicators so to deal with the various factors affecting EHS in one hand, and minimize the number of indicators because of the reluctance of organizations to develop and implement numerous and too heavy indicators? How to coordinate the definition of indicators at various levels of the organization in order to help improving communication and common understanding of EHS issues? How to ensure that organizations take benefit of indicators without facing common side effects as misinterpretations, management by numbers... This paper will suggest an approach aiming to help organizations to develop a coherent and well adapted set of indicators for EHS management. According to a systemic vision, the various dimensions impacting EHS can be systematically addressed in an integrated way allowing a global optimization of the organization resources