Hoyer’s approach to benchmarking

BEST AGAINST THE REST

BENCHMARKING • TRAINING AND LEADERSHIP ARE FUNDAMENTAL TO GOOD SAFETY PERFORMANCE BUT KNOWING HOW AN ORGANISATION COMPARES IS NOT ALWAYS EASY

OVER THE PAST three decades, systems have been put in place that aim to encourage continuous improvement in safety performance. In Europe, chief among these is the Safety and Quality Assessment for Sustainability (SQAS) scheme, developed by the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic). SQAS allows assessed companies active in chemical logistics and related services to compare their performance over time and against other operators.

The Hoyer Group has kindly shared with HCB some details of its recent SHEQ performance benchmarking meeting, where it noted that reliable and comparable SHEQ performance information is hard to find, difficult to interpret and even more difficult to compare. This is despite Hoyer’s commitment to public transparency and its development of more demanding and precise definitions concerning incidents. “Hoyer’s management focus is on being competitive against ourselves,” it said, both in terms of safety improvements over time and between different parts of the organisation.

The results of that focus were evident in Hoyer’s recertification last year to ISO 9001. Eric Schlichter, the group’s SHEQ Forum manager, said that, “Considering the complexity of our business, the variety of controlled processes and interfaces and the network of many Hoyer locations all over the world, the potential for a big variety of non-conformities is very high. Yet there were only three minor non-conformities identified.”

Furthermore, Schlichter continued, “This success is only possible with a workforce who understands the business and pulls, as a team. In a common direction. On the other hand, and maybe even more important, this is only possible because Hoyer has a management who not only understands the importance of a well established quality management system but also drives and supports all employees in undertaking their daily duties. This is rarely seen with such clarity in other companies.”

MEASURING PERFORMANCE ISO 9001 certification is a fundamental requirement for all companies active in the sector but does not provide any comparative performance indications. To do that, it is necessary to look elsewhere. For instance, during 2020, Hoyer’s tank cleaning affiliate, cotac, decided to measure itself against the key performance indicators (KPIs) used by BG Holz und Metall, the representative organisation to which many of its employees belong. By July 2020, four of cotac’s seven European sites had been assessed against those KPIs, with some wide variations being recorded. This does, though, provide a clear indication of where changes need to be made.

More broadly across the Hoyer Group, SQAS ‘scores’ offer a clearer comparison. For instance, the average European tank cleaning SQAS score in 2019 was 79 per cent; the six Netlog cleaning stations assessed during 2019 recorded scores of between 81 and 92 per cent, all better than the industry average.

Likewise the average European chemical warehousing SQAS score in 2015 was 84 per cent; Hoyer’s two warehouses achieved scores of 92 and 94 per cent. The average chemical transport SQAS score in 2019 was 74 per cent, compared to results from six Hoyer Chemilog sites assessed during the year that ranged from 80 to 93 per cent.

Other recognitions are available and Hoyer was one of four supply chain operators (alongside Bertschi, Den Hartogh and H Essers) to be recognised by Dow under its 4Star award programme in 2020.

Hoyer’s performance benchmarking shows how complex the notion of measuring safety can be but, happily for the company, it also shows how well Hoyer is doing against its competitors. www.hoyer-group.com www.sqas.org

EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION IS A CRUCIAL PART