http://www.wmurrayclark.com
W. Murray Clark Limited has been supplying poultry and hog farmers with quality equipment and exceptional service since 1950. The Company mandate is to provide poultry, egg and hog producers with the finest equipment available and the best service in the province. Since 1950 hundreds of producers from all over Ontario have turned to W. Murray Clark Limited for expert service and installations.
http://www.iowaselect.com
At Iowa Select Farms, we are focused on improving the skills of our people so that we can help them better themselves and so that we can better serve the needs of our customers. We strive to recognize and utilize the unique skills of each individual. Our employee education and development plan provides formalized training and a career path for each individual who wants to advance.
http://www.hytekmb.com
Hytek Ltd. was founded in 1994 as a joint venture between two farms near La Broquerie, Manitoba and has quickly grown since then to become Canada's second-largest pork producer. Hytek remains headquartered in La Broquerie, from where our high-tech production system produces over one million pigs annually. We also raise breeding stock and finished market hogs in Canada and the United States.
As a company we remain committed to producing the safe, nutritious and high-quality pork products that consumers deserve. We take all measures to ensure that all of our products meet or exceed highest industry standards within an environmentally sustainable system. We are also committed to providing a safe and rewarding work environment for our employees, and we provide our valued staff with continuous opportunities to grow and succeed in a dynamic work environment. These commitments have helped Hytek achieve recognition as not only one of the leading producers of premium quality food products for the global marketplace, but also the honour of being named one of Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies.
http://www.triumphfoods.com
Triumph Foods, LLC is a producer-owned pork processing company. Triumph supplies superior pig genetics to its producers from a customised genetic improvement programme that emphasises high quality pork. It is constructing a 620,000 sq. ft. pork processing facility and corporate headquarters on a 65-acre site in St. Joseph, Missouri, USA. Triumph's new processing facility is scheduled to begin operations in the autumn of 2005.
http://www.murphybrownllc.com
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, 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 hired 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.
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 the "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 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.
