FM Global Spotlights Knoll Risk Management Approach

FM Global – the international risk management and mitigation company – featured its work with the Knoll risk management team in Reason: the company’s bi-annual publication that highlights notable projects as well as current trends and insights throughout the industry. “It’s an occupation pride at a company that has been creating inspired interiors for businesses and residences for more than 80 years,” writes the staff at FM Global, “If you look closely, Knoll furniture can be spotted on TV sets, in movies and throughout the offices and in the boardrooms of Fortune 100 companies.”

Knoll took a deeper dive into its relationship with FM Global following a fire in its Toronto, Canada manufacturing facility. The risk mitigation systems in place worked – the fire was contained to the dust collection area outside of the facility. Senior management at Knoll saw the event as an opportunity to improve the effective risk management procedures already in place and take full advantage of the services offered under FM Global. Today, Knoll employs 70 of their services to mitigate risk: pre-acquisition visits, project planning, plan review, site risk analysis, location-based engineering and more.

Reason notes the Knoll approach to risk management for its commitment to continuous improvement in order to uphold the brand’s high standards of quality and customer satisfaction. “Our focus has always been on continuously improving our service performance and it was really a matter of aligning our risk management philosophy with our strategic objective,” Knoll Senior Director, Strategic Projects and Risk Management Jane Dwyer told Reason, “A single delay in one of our manufacturing sites can jeopardize our ability to deliver an order on time.”

FM Global also highlighted the design-driven, collaborative approach custom to Knoll, citing it as instrumental to the company’s overall resiliency and ability to anticipate inevitable change through risk management. “Everyone here used to call the FM Global engineers ‘the sprinkler guys.’ Today we work together to understand what the most effective way is to mitigate risk,” Knoll Vice President of Environmental Health and Safety Kenson Silverthorne notes, “It might be sprinklers, or flue spacing in the racks, or increased inspections or more frequent cleaning of the machinery. It’s so much more than sprinklers.”