Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
- Europe
Country
- European Union
- United States
Product
- Sphera Essential Suite
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Applicable Industries
- Agriculture
- Food & Beverage
Use Cases
- Regulatory Compliance Monitoring
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
In 1902, George A. Archer and John W. Daniels established a small linseed crushing business in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Today, their company -Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) –has grown into a vast, international agribusiness with 30,000 employees working at more than 725 facilities to provide food, feed, fuel and industrial products in 160 countries around the world. ADM’s unmatched assets and global scale give the company a competitive advantage in the marketplace and the company’s growth over the years is attributable in part to the breadth and diversity of its operations. From a small peanut-buying station to a large corn processing facility, ADM provides customers with a matrix of value, a mix of agricultural products, and services that meet their specific needs.
The Challenge
Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) is a vast, international agribusiness with 30,000 employees working at more than 725 facilities in 160 countries. The company's growth over the years is attributable in part to the breadth and diversity of its operations. However, environmental information management was decentralized at ADM. Environmental managers developed their own work processes to meet the needs of their grain elevators, flour mills, corn processing or oilseed processing plants. Their information systems were narrowly scoped and fragmented because they had been built separately by consultants, locations, divisions and departments to comply with only the local, regional and national government regulations applied to their operations. This diverse group of corporate and operations professionals formed an Environmental Leadership Team (ELT) to promote collaboration and enable joint decision-making. In 2009, the ELT responded to proliferating regulations and demands for greater transparency from ADM’s senior management by hiring a third-party consultant to do a formal risk analysis benchmarking study of existing environmental practices and procedures.
The Solution
The new EMIS - called GEMINI (Global Environmental Management Information Network Initiative) - was approved by senior management in late 2010. The team immediately purchased Sphera Essential Suite,® part of the Sphera Environmental Performance Solution, including capabilities for compliance, tasking, audits, air, water, waste, fugitives, chemical inventory and more. The ELT and IT team began the implementation of GEMINI by deploying Sphera Essential Suite at 7 pilot sites, which represented various types of ADM facilities around the world from large corn mills to small country grain elevators in the United States, Europe and South America. They began by implementing capabilities built specifically for compliance and task management. GEMINI’s pilot test was successful, demonstrating the new system fit ADM’s requirements as a large, highly diversified global organization. First, it promoted standardization by collecting and managing a broad variety of environmental compliance requirements within a unified framework. It also established consistent industry best-practice workflows to ensure that tasks are assigned, tracked and completed.
Operational Impact
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