Obligations of sound management of your activity guide you to lead to success your site, regardless of whether it is a construction yard, a supermarket, a plant, a logistics centre, a research facility or a clinic. You contribute thereby to the responsibility of your organization towards some stakeholders such as shareholders, customers or your employees. Regulation, voluntary measures and contracts add to these managerial responsibilities.

Obligations

• Obligations stemming from voluntary measures can be seen as additions to the obligations of sound management specific to your organization or to your industry.
• Most contractual obligations are fulfilled by the moral person that is your site or your organization
• Works contracts create obligations ruled by work law which can involve the personal legal liability of the physical person with the highest rank in the hierarchy. Named employeur in the French Code du travail, this individual has a result obligation on health and safety at work.
• Usage on a site of some installations (such as the nuclear medicine ones in an hospital of a petrol station in a supermarket) or of chemicals in quantity, as well as some manufacturing activities (such as oil refining) create an installation classified for environmental protection. Reporting obligations and for some mandatory inspections are applicable to those running these installations.

 Regulatory intelligence

• Major changes on the site such as new equipment or new products may generate the need for a new analysis.
• A regulatory text, irrespective of law maker, language, geographical scope where it is applicable, object it regulates follows the same structure of speech. In substance, each regulatory text says « if your site meets the inclusion criteria of the regulatory text, then you have these obligations”. It also specifies penalties for non-compliance.
• Changes in regulation can change inclusion criteria for sites in an existing text and stipulate inclusion criteria met by the site in new regulatory texts.
• The continuous improvement of profile elements of your site and of the analysis of regulatory texts has to enable you to answer at all times the question “what are the regulatory obligations I am responsible to fulfil?”
• This helicopter view will help you cluster obligations into a homogeneous group propitious to delegation. See for instance obligations relative to CMR (Carcinogenic, mutagenic, repro-toxic substances) of work law, REACh and the EEC directive in this synopsis.

 Delegations of power

• If no delegation of power exists, all regulatory obligations are fulfilled by the site manager. Similarly for voluntary measures, in the absence of management action, the most senior manager is responsible for the implementation of voluntary measures on the site.
• A site manager willing to bring management acts yielding compliance  as near of daily work as feasible, can and should delegate power.
• This screenshot illustrates the Blotfelden (France) site of the Acmé company , the site manager  (see the red rectangle) and his responsibilities
• .Before the management process permits an appropriate split of responsibilities to capable individuals; the site manager fulfils all responsibilities.
• In this example, regulatory obligations go from biometry (Iris scan to control access to the R&D department) to Worker exposure profile, each with one or more points of compliance.
• A site manager is responsible for voluntary measures. Even though they do not originate in regulation, achieving the objectives of voluntary measures is a must for site performance.
• An effective site management process enables the grouping of responsibilities with a unity of location and nature into a homogeneous group. This grouping enables the clarification of roles and delegation of a group to an individual who has hierarchical authority on people and resources necessary and sufficient to fulfil the group of responsibilities.

• For a delegation of power to have legal strength, it is necessary (but not sufficient) that a delegatee has professional skills and means commensurate to the delegated responsibility.
• The delegated responsibility, the means granted to fulfil the responsibility, the range of dates for validity and the regulatory texts applicable can usefully be formalized in a document formalizing the outcome of negotiation between a site manager and his delegatee.
• Coming back to the usage example previously evoked, the production manager (see red rectangle on the screenshot) has agreed with the site manager that he would fulfil CMR responsibility in production; as well as for the compliance of machines. The negotiation process has brought to the production manager budget means to perform technical and process development studies for compliance to the machines directive. It has also brought the authority of being the contact point of the work physician on CMR; as well as budget to acquire and implement application software to map substances and zones. Details of means and complete terms of the delegation of authority are in electronic delegation of power documents that are in version 4.2 and 3.5.
• Clarity brought by well designed delegations of power and the availability of this information to involved individuals and their teams grants to the management system the intelligence of a site’s organization.