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How Hollister Cut Monthly EHS Review Meetings from Five Hours to One
Hollister Incorporated develops, manufactures, and markets healthcare products and services worldwide. Its portfolio includes ostomy care, continence care, and critical care, with manufacturing and distribution facilities in the U.S., Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and India. Daniel Vargas, Corporate EHS Manager, oversees EHS across the company's global operations. He has spent the last five years building Hollister's EHS function from the ground up, developing policies, formalizing data-capture processes, and leading ISO 45001 and 14001 certification efforts across all sites.
Impact
- Standardized EHS data capture across all global sites, replacing an uncoordinated mix of non-document-controlled Excel forms and email with a single, calibrated system
- Reduced the monthly cross-site EHS CAPA review meeting from approximately five hours to one hour, through instantly accessible, properly organized records
- Achieved full associate participation in the observation program, meeting the organizational goal of one observation per employee per quarter
- Established timely incident reporting accountability across all sites, with directors receiving automated notifications and sites held to a 24-hour submission expectation
- Enabled production of reliable, trusted EHS metrics for leadership, replacing data the team knew could not support sound budgetary or operational decisions
Outcome
After implementing Intelex, Hollister's EHS team saw an immediate shift in how data moved across the organization. The clearest early proof was the monthly CAPA meeting, a cross-site review of EHS actions and incident records. What had previously taken about five hours, sometimes nearly a full day of searching through emails and spreadsheets, dropped to one hour. With every record properly organized and searchable by record number inside Intelex, the team could open any file in real time and move through the agenda without interruption.
Incident reporting timeliness improved as well. Automated notifications sent directly to Daniel and other directors each time an incident was logged at any site created visible accountability. Sites that had been slow to report knew delayed or missing submissions would be flagged. The expectation of submitting a record within 24 hours, visible to leadership, changed behavior without manual follow-up.
Perhaps the most meaningful shift was in the value of the data itself. Hollister could produce automated reports and real-time data feeds that site managers, operations directors, and VPs could use to make decisions. That reliability, which the team could not offer with the old Excel-and-email approach, made the EHS function's work feel purposeful in a way it had not before.
The Challenge for Hollister
When Daniel joined Hollister five years ago, the organization had EHS standards and safety-specific requirements on paper but lacked a formal system to capture data. Each site operated independently. Some filled out Excel forms that were not standardized or document-controlled. Others submitted root cause analyses or investigations by email, following local practices they had developed. Forms were shared through SharePoint, copied locally, and modified. Within months, different sites worked from different versions of the same document, uncalibrated from one another.
The situation was unsustainable not just because of the administrative burden of maintaining spreadsheets and consolidating emails. The data could not be trusted to reflect what was actually happening. If a trend suggested a safety hazard, like a spike in machine-guarding-related near misses, the EHS team could not act confidently. The submissions might reflect inconsistent terminology or reporting behavior rather than real risk. Daniel described producing metrics under those conditions as demoralizing. Leadership saw the reports, but the information was not reliable enough to support informed decisions on budgets, investments, or management priorities.
“The numbers didn't have real value, so it was very demoralizing. And that's exactly why Intelex came into the picture. We knew there had to be a better way.”
Daniel Vargas, Corporate EHS Manager
"We're able to do the meeting now in one hour, because we have all the files properly organized. Before, without overreacting, that would take five hours. It would have been an all-day meeting."
Daniel Vargas, Corporate EHS Manager
"The main impact has been that everyone uses Intelex. They know exactly what to do and it saves us a lot of time because I have a good amount of control over the system."
Daniel Vargas, Corporate EHS Manager
“Our local sites have recurring reporting requirements. For example, plant managers expect a monthly update, which the site EHS manager normally sends manually. At the corporate level, I often had to re‑create versions of those reports for VPs, directors, and other stakeholders. With Intelex, we were able to build our own reports directly in the system and schedule them to be automatically emailed, which eliminated a lot of manual work.”
Daniel Vargas, Corporate EHS Manager
"We have all associates participating. Now we're just coming up with better systems to make sure that what has been submitted is quality information."
Daniel Vargas, Corporate EHS Manager
How Intelex Helped Hollister
Hollister's evaluation of EHS software platforms predated Daniel's arrival. His predecessor had reviewed multiple solutions and selected Intelex, with the platform's customizability as a decisive factor. At the time, Hollister operated two distinct business units with different tracking needs. Individual sites had specific requirements that a rigid, out-of-the-box solution could not accommodate.
For example, one site needed an HR data feed that could distinguish between employees who shared first and last names, a configuration that Intelex could support at the site level. As the in-house platform admin, Daniel could make form and module changes that propagated immediately across all sites the next time users logged in — no change-management email, no risk of version drift.
When Hollister first implemented Intelex, they lacked a dedicated observation module, so they used the near-miss module for both purposes. The problem was that near misses require investigation, and when large sites were told the goal was one observation per employee per quarter, the math was alarming. For example, a 900-person facility would need to carry out 900 investigations per quarter.
Hollister recently adopted Intelex's observation module and used the Consulting On Demand service to build it out, designing it to be fast and frictionless: employees could submit and close in a single step, with one optional field to notify a supervisor if follow-up was needed. Removing the investigation burden from routine observations and making the module accessible from kiosks and computers across all sites led to a significant increase in participation.
Hollister also built automated report scheduling within Intelex, distributing different report views to plant managers, directors, and VPs on set cadences without manual intervention. The OData feature provided a live data connection that Hollister extended through Power BI and Power Automate for additional analysis and reporting. Daniel noted that the responsiveness of Intelex's customer success support, especially since their current customer manager joined, made the partnership more collaborative and productive.