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The year 1998 signalized change for the Charleston, South Carolina Commissioners of Public Works(CPW) that included: three changes in the top four officer positions with CPW's fourth new General Managerin the last 80 years; competitiveness as a major issue as CPW had some of the highestwastewater rates in the country; and, major succession issues had to be confronted with a numberof senior personnel approaching retirement.CPW needed a cultural change to become morecompetitive and to strategically plan for personnel changes that would accompany the impendingretirements. Most importantly, it needed to define a vision and implementation scheme for 2005,the time frame CPW's Board of Directors gave to implement these essentialchanges.As executive management looked at the various improvement programs that were availablesuch as Qualserve, Partnership For Safe Water and others, it felt that although these wereuseful tools, they would not yield the two things needed most:an overarching direction; and,a program for Continual Improvement.Executive management also believed that, whatever road was taken, it should involve everyassociate in the utility. Every associate of CPW would need to know what the utility wascollectively doing, and to help define where it was going. As the needs of CPW were assessed, it was determined that two major efforts would be pursued:a Strategic Planning Process; and,achieving utility-wide registration of an Environmental Management System (EMS).It was understood that it would be an extraordinary effort to do both simultaneously; in fact, nowater or wastewater utility at the time had ever achieved utility certification of their EMS.Nonetheless, both efforts were seen as critical for the strategic plan to give CPW an overarchingdirection, the EMS to reflect CPW's commitment to environmental responsibility, and toprovide the utility with a framework for continual improvement. Includes figure.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Number of Pages: 8 File Size: 1 file , 190 KB