CASE STUDY
Incident Management
INDUSTRY
Consumer Self-Care / OTC Pharma
EMPLOYEES
10,000+
SITES
11+ Global
ASTM
2008
SIF
Executive Outcome Summary
Perrigo, a global consumer self-care and over-the-counter pharmaceutical manufacturer with more than 10,000 employees across the U.S., UK, and Europe, is strengthening its incident management program by aligning injury and illness classification with ASTM E2920-26, reviewing historical incident data extending to 2008, and building a more consistent foundation for severity-based analysis and executive reporting. Working with Benchmark Gensuite as its system of record for incident management, the organization is shifting from a recordability-focused performance lens toward a more comprehensive view of serious injury and fatality risk — giving EHS leadership greater confidence that the data driving safety decisions reflects the risks that matter most.
Supporting Consistent Safety Governance Across a Global Consumer Healthcare Enterprise
Perrigo is a leading consumer self-care organization with more than 10,000 employees and operations spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe across 11 or more manufacturing and distribution sites. The company produces and distributes a broad portfolio of over-the-counter pharmaceutical, oral care, nutritional, and consumer wellness products.
Operating across multiple jurisdictions introduces meaningful complexity into EHS governance. While corporate reporting requirements are managed centrally from the U.S., individual facilities must also navigate country-specific regulatory expectations across the UK and Europe. That dual-reporting environment creates room for inconsistency in how incidents are evaluated, classified, and reported — limiting the organization’s ability to compare risk profiles across sites, build executive reporting that reflects a coherent enterprise picture, and direct prevention resources toward the highest-consequence risks with confidence. For Perrigo’s EHS leadership, improving classification consistency and data quality became the foundational step toward a more mature, prevention-focused safety program.
Industry Context
Why Recordability Alone No Longer Provides Sufficient Visibility Into Serious Risk
Like many organizations, Perrigo historically relied on recordable and reportable incident classifications as primary indicators of safety performance. Those metrics remain necessary for regulatory reporting and benchmarking — but they do not reliably distinguish between events with similar recordability outcomes that represent very different levels of organizational risk. A minor recordable and a high-potential near miss can appear identical in a recordable-rate dashboard while pointing toward dramatically different prevention priorities.
The EHS team identified several interconnected challenges that limited the organization’s ability to evaluate and compare incident severity consistently across its global operation:
Tanya Moore — Corporate EHS System Analyst, Perrigo
Combining Digital Incident Management with Evolving Safety Classification Practices
Perrigo partnered with the Benchmark Gensuite team to redesign its incident classification and reporting framework around ASTM E2920-26 — a standard designed to bring rigor and consistency to how organizations identify, categorize, and analyze serious injury and fatality risk. The effort extended well beyond software configuration, requiring collaboration among EHS practitioners, system administrators, and operational stakeholders to determine how severity-based classifications could be implemented practically across a diverse global workforce.
A notable component of the initiative was Perrigo’s participation in a Benchmark Gensuite subscriber workgroup focused on incident management enhancements and ASTM alignment. Through that collaboration, Perrigo’s practitioners contributed direct operational experience to platform development decisions — helping ensure that classification logic, workflow design, and reporting structures remained grounded in the realities of incident investigation and multi-site reporting. That kind of co-development participation reflects a core element of the Benchmark Gensuite model, and for Perrigo, it meant that the organization’s investment in ASTM alignment was shaping capabilities with longer-term program value.
How Perrigo Built a Structured Framework for Severity-Based Incident Classification
1
Aligning injury and illness classification to ASTM E2920-26
Perrigo reviewed and refined its incident classification structures to align injury and illness category values with ASTM definitions and severity criteria. The Benchmark Gensuite platform was configured with updated dropdown values, structured review pathways, work-relatedness evaluation logic, and severity-level determination workflows — replacing variable regional interpretations with a consistent, standard-based decision structure applicable across all global sites.
2
Introducing SIF Risk, PSIF, and Actual SIF evaluation alongside recordability tracking
Rather than relying exclusively on recordability outcomes, incident reviews were expanded to incorporate consideration of severity potential, SIF Risk classification, Potential SIF (PSIF) identification, actual serious outcomes, and exposure scenarios. This richer framework gives EHS leadership a more nuanced and actionable view of the organization’s risk profile — and creates a consistent basis for comparing severity trends across sites and reporting periods.
3
Reviewing and validating historical incident data
Recognizing that future classifications alone would not provide complete visibility, Perrigo initiated a detailed review of historical incident records, including cases at long-standing sites extending as far back as 2008. Where incident descriptions lacked sufficient detail, the team consulted workers’ compensation records, HR documentation, and available medical information to verify severity-relevant details. The process also surfaced the need for practical internal governance guidance on interpreting incomplete records consistently — which the EHS team developed to support ongoing classification reliability.
4
Improving frontline capture with AI-assisted photo and voice reporting
Benchmark Gensuite’s mobile-first photo and voice AI input capabilities were introduced to improve the completeness and accuracy of incident descriptions at the point of capture. By allowing frontline users to document events through images or voice rather than manual text entry, these tools reduce documentation burden, minimize entry errors, and produce richer initial records — strengthening the data foundation that both severity classification and AI-assisted risk analysis depend on.
5
What Changed: Stronger Data Confidence, Deeper Risk Visibility, and Shifting Safety Culture
Perrigo’s program is still evolving, but the operational outcomes already emerging from the initiative reflect the value of investing in classification quality and data governance before layering on analytics and AI capabilities.
Reduced classification variability across regions through a shared ASTM-aligned severity framework
Historical data validated to 2008, giving leadership confidence in long-term trend analysis for the first time
Executive safety discussions increasingly centered on severity exposure rather than recordable counts
Patterns associated with higher-consequence risks more visible and actionable for prevention planning
Frontline incident capture improved through AI-assisted photo and voice documentation
Internal classification governance guidance established to sustain consistency as the program matures
Voice of the Customer
“Now I know I actually have good data.”
Tanya Moore — Corporate EHS System Analyst, Perrigo
How Perrigo’s Incident Evaluation Approach Is Evolving
What Perrigo is building isn’t a single system change — it’s a fundamentally different way of understanding and responding to risk. The shift from recordability-focused reporting to severity-based analysis touches every layer of the incident management program, from how a frontline worker documents an event on a tablet to how an executive interprets safety performance. The table below captures where the organization started and where it’s headed across each of those layers.
| BEFORE | AFTER |
|---|---|
| Primary performance lens was recordable and reportable incident outcomes | Severity potential and SIF risk evaluation guide performance conversations alongside recordability |
| Multiple regional interpretations of injury and illness classifications limited cross-site comparability | ASTM E2920-26 framework applied consistently across all global sites through Benchmark Gensuite |
| Historical records varied in detail and consistency, undermining reliable trend analysis | Records reviewed and validated to 2008; internal governance guidance established for ongoing classification consistency |
| Executive reporting centered on lagging indicators with limited severity context | Severity-informed risk discussions give leaders deeper insight into where serious injury exposure is concentrating |
| Incident descriptions often incomplete at point of capture due to manual text entry burden | AI-assisted photo and voice input improves capture completeness and reduces documentation errors at the frontline |
| High-potential incidents identified through manual review with no systematic AI-assisted risk flagging | PSI AI Advisor analyzes incident descriptions against verified SIF scenarios to surface serious risk earlier in the review process |
What Perrigo’s Experience Reveals About Severity-Based Incident Classification Programs
Perrigo’s initiative surfaces several lessons directly relevant to EHS organizations pursuing similar classification modernization and data quality improvements.
Why More EHS Organizations Are Moving Beyond Traditional Recordability Metrics
Perrigo’s experience reflects a shift underway across EHS programs in manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and industrial operations globally. For decades, Total Recordable Rate has served as the primary lens for safety performance — a metric that satisfies regulatory reporting requirements but that a growing body of operational evidence suggests is poorly correlated with catastrophic risk. Organizations can maintain low recordable rates while carrying significant latent exposure to serious injuries and fatalities; high-frequency minor incidents can dominate recordable-rate reporting without pointing toward the risks most likely to produce severe outcomes.
The adoption of ASTM E2920-26 and SIF prevention frameworks represents the EHS profession’s practical response to that limitation. By classifying incidents according to their severity potential — distinguishing SIF Risk events, Potential SIFs, and Actual SIFs from the broader recordable population — organizations build prevention strategies targeted at the highest-consequence risks rather than the most frequent ones. That distinction has direct implications for how safety resources are allocated, how leadership attention is directed, and how EHS programs demonstrate operational value beyond compliance metrics.
It’s getting everyone away from the recordable rate and being all on one page.
Tanya Moore — Corporate EHS System Analyst, Perrigo
ORGANIZATION
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland
Employees
10,000+
Sites
11+ globally (U.S., UK, Europe)
Industry
Consumer Self-Care / OTC Pharmaceutical
Solutions Used
Incident Management
PSI AI Advisor
TOPICS
SIF Prevention
ASTM E2920
Incident Classification
EHS Data Governance
Severity Analysis
Leading Indicators
AI Risk Identification
Executive Reporting
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