OUR EXPERIENCE WITH ENVIRONMENTAL

MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (EMS) DEVELOPMENT

 

Don Butler

Director of Government Relations and Public Affairs

Murphy-Brown, LLC

Warsaw, North Carolina

 

Murphy-Brown LLC is the livestock production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, Inc., the largest producer and processor of pork and pork products in the world with over 800,000 sow currently in production. The company was formed in 2001 to manage the wholly owned production units of Brown's of Carolina, Murphy Farms, and Carroll's Turkeys. We own and operate approximately five hundred swine production farms in eleven states in the U.S. and also have production units in Mexico, Poland, and Brazil. The company currently employs approximately 4,500 people and has an annual payroll in excess of 140 million dollars. At Murphy-Brown we recognize and accept our responsibility to protect the environment and the commitment to sound environmental management is at the core of our business philosophy. We are not content to merely be in compliance with all relevant permitting and legal requirements for our business. In addition to regulatory compliance, we have made additional commitments, through our EMS, to pollution prevention and to continual improvement in the environmental arena.

I first learned about EMS during social conversations with Ms. Suzanne Sessoms of Wilmington, NC in 1996. She is a professional consultant who works with businesses all over the world to develop and implement EMSs. The more we talked about the concept of an EMS the more it seemed that this tool would be valuable in the management of our business. In February 1997, Carroll's Foods had not yet been acquired by Smithfield Foods and was a privately held corporation. When I first presented the concept of EMS to Carroll's president Sonny Faison, he immediately saw the potential benefits to the business and decided that the company would commit to develop and implement an EMS sufficient to achieve the prestigious ISO 14001 certification, the gold standard for EMS. For those of you who may not have heard of ISO, ISO stands for the International Organization for Standards, an international standards body based in Geneva, Switzerland. The ISO 14001 Standard is a set of requirements developed in 1996 by experts from around the world to approach environmental management in a comprehensive and organized way.  In order to become ISO 14001 "certified" an organization must meet, and have verified by independent auditors, all of the requirements in the Standard. You may have heard of the ISO 9000 Standard for quality management. ISO 14001 is the international standard for environmental management. ISO 14001 EMSs have become the tool of choice for many leading companies throughout the world (DuPont, Burroughs Wellcome, Hewlett Packard, General Motors, and IBM to name a few). We decided to hire Suzanne Sessoms who had been the principal EMS consultant to IBM and Hewlett Packard, as our consultant to assist with the development of our EMS

I am not going to go into detail here about the Standard but I want you to get a look at an outline of its requirements here.

In late February1997, I was appointed by Mr.Faison as the project manager for this ambitious undertaking. In addition to working with Suzanne Sessoms, I was ably assisted by my colleague Carolyn Strickland who quickly assumed the key position of EMS Coordinator. Before the process was over, many other people were involved in the effort but in the beginning, we were it. Since there were no existing models for EMS development for a livestock production operation for us to follow, the task before us seemed daunting.The single most important thing we had going for us in the early days of EMS was the fact that the president of the company had made a rock solid commitment to do this thing and do it right. I helped him prepare a letter, to be sent to all the employees, describing the concept of an EMS and clearly articulating his support, not just in words but also indicating that the necessary financial and human resources would be committed and made available toward the achievement of our goal.

Over the next few months we, along with key personnel from various disciplines within the company, examined all of the "aspects " of our business that had, or could have, an impact on the environment. This process is central to the development of a credible EMS Once we had identified all of our environmental "aspects" we conducted an evaluation to determine their "significance". The significance of each aspect was, in our case, determined by considering legal and regulatory requirements, severity and consequences, relative or perceived risk, and the concerns of external interested parties. Our EMS is designed to manage, in an organized and verifiable way, each of the "significant aspects".

Once their "aspects" have been identified the Standard requires the organization to develop a system to manage all of the significant aspects. The EMS concept is based on the PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT approach outlined in the well established Shewart/Deming Improvement Cycle.

Once we had developed an EMS using this approach,  which we felt would meet the Standard's requirements, we employed an accredited third party audit company to come in and conduct a pre-assessment of our EMS to verify that our EMS documentation and proposed approach did in fact meet the requirements. This pre-assessment process basically determines what it is that you say you are going to do. Once we received confirmation that our EMS plan was capable of becoming certified, the process of plan implementation began in earnest. This involved a massive orientation and training effort to bring all of the employees affected by the EMS up to speed on the objectives of the EMS and to train each of them on their respective responsibilities within the EMS. They were trained to understand the company's Environmental Policy and the consequences for violating the Policy, the Emergency Action Plan for use in the event of environmental emergencies, the environmental aspects, which could be affected by their jobs, and how to monitor, measure, and report on these aspects. Our EMS includes a series of daily and weekly checklists, internal EMS audits, and a robust preventive and corrective action system. This approach ensures that problems or potential problems are identified, a responsible party is identified to fix the problem, and that each of these item is tracked through closure.

The next step in the process was the "certification audit" wherein the external auditors come in to determine whether all of the elements of the Standard were actually being met, after implementation, within the organization. This is a very thorough process which involves more examination of key documents to see verify that we were actually doing what our EMS manual said we would do. This process includes interviews with various people in the company regarding their respective roles within the EMS, visits to randomly selected company farms to confirm the EMS was being followed, and a closing meeting with company management to report the auditors' findings.

The road to EMS certification was not without bumps, twists, and turns. Since our beginning efforts at Carroll's Foods in 1997 several different developments had an impact on our EMS efforts. In 1998 the bottom fell out of the hog market and we saw historically low prices, well below the cost of production, Carroll's Foods was acquired by Smithfield Foods, and both Murphy Farms and Brown's of Carolina became wholly owned subsidiaries of Smithfield. These intervening events did interrupt the orderly progression of EMS development but they did not stop the process. Interestingly, when Smithfield acquired Carroll's they asked me how we managed our environmental affairs. I showed them where we were with EMS development and explained how enthusiastic we were to continue its development. Once Smithfield Foods' executives understood EMSs, they too became enthusiastic about its use in our company and not only gave the go ahead to finalize the EMS within Carroll's but committed to extend the EMS to the rest of the company owned production units in the U.S. On March 21, 2001, SGS, International Certification Services, the accredited ISO Registrar hired to conduct third party audits of the system, presented the Green Dove Award to Carroll's Foods, signifying that the company had achieved the coveted ISO 14001 certification. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first ISO 14001 certification of an EMS for a livestock operation anywhere in the world.

Since this momentous event much more progress has been made with EMS. Murphy Farms, Brown's of Carolina and NPD-USA, our genetics company, have all developed EMSs and have achieved ISO 14001 certification. As of today, all company owned swine farms east of the Mississippi are certified. All company operations west of the river have developed and implemented EMSs and will have their ISO certification audit by the end of the first quarter in 2003. We are confident they too will receive their certification.

The proof of any management system is its effectiveness. It is in this area that we are most proud of our accomplishments. First and foremost, we have seen a change in the culture of our business. Environmental management is no longer someone else's job. If you work for our company, it's now part of your job. Our employees take pride in doing their part to make sure that we are respectful and protective of the environment. We know it is working because we have seen a reduction of approximately 75% in the number of  regulatory non-conformances during the first year after EMS implementation. Today, our farms are cleaner, our employees are more confident in their knowledge of how to manage environmental affairs, the state regulatory inspectors are making positive comments about the effectiveness of our management system, and there has been a sharp reduction in the number of negative stories in the news. We can't take full credit for the reduction in negative stories but, when we are out of the news,  that's good for others in the business.  Our company has received positive recognition of our EMS by the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulatory agencies, and many others. It is important to note that EMS certification is not a one-time accomplishment. In order to maintain our ISO 14001 certification we are audited every six months by SGS, International Certification Services. If we fail to continually meet all the requirements of the Standard, we could loose our certification. Training is ongoing and the EMS is a living, ever improving instrument which is the foundation of the management approach which we use every day to maintain our position as the swine industry's leader in environmental protection.

In closing, I am pleased and proud to let you know that, in addition to our adoption of EMS on the production side, Smithfield Foods has recently made the commitment to develop and implement ISO 14001 certified EMSs in all its packing and processing plants in the U. S. by the end of 2004.