Johnson Controls has been in business for about 130 years. Warren T Johnson started the company with the very first commercially viable thermostat in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Today, the company’s U.S. headquarters is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Globally JCI has more than 100,000 employees and reports approximately $23 billion in annual sales. JCI helps optimize building performance, improves safety, and enhances comfort in environments where people live, work, learn and play. JCI’s global operation includes manufacturing, service, distribution and research and development. In 2020, JCI was recognized by 16 different entities for achievements in Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance or ESG, for providing solutions and products to help reduce energy and provide more efficient operations for its customers worldwide.

In late 2019, the safety team created a safety vision for JCI, called “Zero Harm,” ensuring that the company would have a very strong safety, health and wellness, and environmental focus across the enterprise. Zero Harm has also been instrumental in the way JCI addressed COVID-19 across the company. JCI adopted ProcessMAP’s integrated and comprehensive digital EHS platform to drive standardization across all operations, eliminating stand-alone reports or localized solutions. The single system provides accurate, complete and timely visibility into actionable insights, thereby elevating best practices across the enterprise. The system quickly delivers all the metrics necessary to report on KPIs and gather statistics that can be reported out of the system, rather than being compiled manually. Finally, the integrated system gives the safety team better information on the state of EHS within the company. With better data, company leaders can make informed decisions on the next business initiative or what area of the business needs to improve performance.

JCI’s safety team strongly believes in the importance of a proper implementation of their EHS platform and that the change management process is critical to its success. As they worked to identify the proper platform and partner, the team understood that employees needed to accept the system as a tool that they would be prepared and ready to use. Stakeholder management was another key to successful implementation, from the C-Suite to frontline employees. The safety team understood the importance of effectively communicating with all their key stakeholders about their EHS system. The third critical element was training, helping all the users to understand the system, and to have strong post go-live support in place to help all system users.

In 2014, JCI became a ProcessMAP customer, utilizing numerous modules in the ProcessMAP EHS platform. What was important to JCI during the vendor selection process for their EHS system was choosing the provider with the best match in philosophy on platform configuration, and a similar vision and philosophy around post go-live support and maintenance that needed to be aligned between the vendor and the customer. JCI first went live with ProcessMAP in 2015, and has continued to add more modular solutions throughout the years.

Johnson Controls Implemented the ProcessMAP Platform

JCI has integrated the ProcessMAP platform with other enterprise solutions that they operate, including integrating with IT on the security side, for single sign-on, and user identification and also integrated with the HR platform for location and demographic data. Building these integrations up front was very beneficial for JCI, as they knew they would have the latest information on employees and users, without worrying about updates. The safety team can also extract EHS performance metrics, performance data, incident statistics, audit statistics, permits, and corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs). The system enables JCI to monitor and track all this information.

Over time, JCI has seen user counts for their EHS system increase, now exceeding 400,000 user logins. Employees are increasingly using the system for audits and inspections, in large part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, where locations needed to operate in terms of the “new normal,” with considerations such as social distancing, single traffic lanes, and even areas beyond the EHS network, including facility management and business continuity. The company continues to identify new priorities where they can utilize their EHS platform to achieve new goals, including reporting near-misses, unsafe acts and unsafe conditions, which they began measuring in 2018. Increased platform use leads to more actions, such as collective and preventive actions being created in the system, including incident investigations. Since 2018, JCI has made recordable case investigation a digital priority, resulting in more than 80 percent of cases now being fully investigated in the system, with the resulting benefit of additional data collected. The end result reflects the near 35% reduction in the company’s TRIR and more than 41% reduction in LTIR, over the last five years. Similarly, reporting of leading safety indicators such as near-miss incidents, unsafe acts, and unsafe conditions, increased by nearly 145% over the last five years.