Lilly established global health, safety, and environmental policies in the early 1990s. We combined those policies into the current Lilly HSE policy. Each of our facilities is responsible for developing its own HSE objectives and plans in accordance with local priorities and corporate commitments, requirements, and goals. Conformance to individual plans will help improve overall HSE performance.
The HSE management system is the primary mechanism for HSE governance within the company. In 2008, our corporate auditing team, which includes external auditors, conducted eight environmental audits and 23 health and safety audits of Lilly business units. The team annually reports information gathered during auditing to the Corporate Compliance Committee and the Global HSE Committee. These groups report progress and areas requiring management attention to senior management, and to the Public Policy and Compliance Committee of the company’s Board of Directors.
Through our enterprise risk management program, management of HSE risks occurs at the highest level of the company. This includes regular reviews of Lilly’s HSE compliance status and other identified HSE risks and opportunities by senior executives and relevant board committees.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), based in Geneva, Switzerland, established ISO 14001 as a voluntary standard for environmental management systems (EMS). Our template for HSE management systems is based on the ISO14001 model. Four Lilly manufacturing facilities are ISO14001-certified: Brazil, China, Ireland, and Mexico.
We are continuing to participate in several voluntary programs related to HSE management, including the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program, the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care® Program, and the Business Roundtable’s S.E.E. Change Initiative (Social, the Environment, the Economy).
Lilly has also formed an alliance with the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration (IOSHA) to help other Indiana businesses improve their health and safety performance. Special emphasis is placed on process safety management.
Assessment of Suppliers and Third-Party Contractors
Lilly has relationships with many third-party suppliers, including those that assist in the development and manufacturing of Lilly products.
Lilly assesses key business partners, including suppliers and third-party operations, against HSE criteria during the robust selection process to determine whether they have implemented responsible employee health, safety, and environmental programs. First, we assess the company’s HSE programs. We then conduct a risk-based review related to the materials being handled. For suppliers of critical materials or those that handle manufacturing steps of higher HSE risk, we conduct an on-site assessment. Finally, we communicate the necessary HSE information on our materials to third-party suppliers.
Lilly urges its suppliers to build the HSE capabilities necessary to partner with us in effectively managing risks and materials. As part of our HSE criteria, Lilly encourages both key suppliers and third-party companies to have appropriate emergency management capabilities to ensure business continuity.
Emergency Response Programs and Practices
Lilly business units are required by company policy and regulatory requirements to have emergency management systems. These systems include an assessment to identify the critical risks that should be addressed in the site emergency plan. Each site must assess its readiness annually. Testing the plan can range from tabletop exercises to full-scale drills that include community fire and emergency agencies.
In addition to testing local site plans, Lilly has a corporate-level incident support team that is ready to commit corporate resources in the event of an incident that impacts tangible assets (such as people and facilities), products, or sites. Major exercises have been conducted in the past at manufacturing and development facilities in Indiana (U.S.), the U.K., Ireland, Puerto Rico, France, Spain, and Mexico. These drills test the site’s emergency plan, emergency response teams, and local agencies.
Manufacturing Process Safety
We have robust systems in place to control our employees’ exposure to potentially hazardous chemicals in the workplace. Lilly industrial hygiene experts assess potential employee exposures and put measures in place to reduce them. Globally, we have recently implemented industry-leading practices for modeling potential exposures at very low levels to predict employee exposure levels.
Control of Chemical Exposures
We continually address process safety risk reduction in our manufacturing operations. The discipline of process safety management has been applied to help prevent hazards from escalating to catastrophic loss events. Process safety management includes risk analysis, active review by management, use of inherently safer design, and monitoring of proactive metrics. During the last several years, we added new tools and analysis methods to identify and reduce the potential for a process safety event in our highest risk scenarios. We also improved the reliability of protective safeguards using a technique known as LOPA, or layers of protective analysis.
