In response to the corporate EHS audit at your facility last month, the Site Manager has called a leadership team meeting to discuss the audit findings. You’re really interested in finding out more about the audit results but in general, you’re feeling pretty good about the condition of the current EHS programs. Everything is going well until the Site Manager says “Finding #5: The site was unable to provide recent industrial hygiene sampling results for noise and dust to justify not having written programs for Respiratory Protection and Hearing Conservation.” The Site Manager then follows this up by saying “I don’t know why this is a finding. We offer dust masks to those who want them and everyone has to wear earplugs while in the manufacturing areas.”
You sink down in your chair a bit because you know exactly what it means. During the audit you were asked to provide these two written programs and you informed the auditors that the exposures to dust and noise in the facility were not at hazardous levels and therefore didn’t feel that either program was necessary. Unfortunately, you also weren’t able to provide the industrial hygiene reports for noise or dust (or anything else) that would have backed up these claims because you couldn’t find the binder where they’re normally kept. You were really hoping the auditors would forget about this but now you have to tell the Site Manager what happened and you know it’s not going to go over very well.
You’re definitely going to need some help managing things but you’ve looked at numerous software programs in the past and always came up empty. Either the software didn’t offer enough flexibility to customize things to your needs or if it did, it was way outside your budget and included a bunch of options you’d never use.
