Enviance
Digital Transformation - Integrating EHS Compliance and Risk Management Into Operations

Preventing injuries and illnesses while improving environmental performance are some of the primary benefits of environment, health, and safety (EHS) programs. As IT organizations look to improve their operations, they often overlook EHS as a business process ripe with IT shadow spend, home-grown systems, thousands of spreadsheets, and expensive custom integration projects. EHS programs are a critical business function ready for digital transformation.

CIOs may be unaware of how EHS information influences investors. Based on recent data from the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, professionally managed U.S. assets that considered environmental, social, and governance information before investing grew to more than $12 trillion. Globally, that number is over $23 trillion.

EHS information requires the same rigor as financial information. John Sinnott, chief technology officer at Enviance, understands the challenges facing IT executives all too well. Sinnott and his team built the first SaaS EHS application as a multitenant cloud service, and he has nearly two decades of experience in helping customers reduce the cost of information management supporting their EHS programs.

“From an IT perspective, EHS management is tough because auditable information is needed to meet local EHS compliance reporting, operational risk reduction, and sustainability reports,” Sinnott said. “EHS information never comes from one system. When we designed our EHS platform, we started with a basic understanding that integrating EHS into other applications would be key.”

"Every time we talked with IT leaders, they told us we need to leverage their existing investment in information management systems. Enviance’s robust API library enables a broad set of enterprise IT use cases, including process automation, IOT integration, iPaaS, BI, and others. EHS teams are often low on the priority list to access IT resources, so it was important for us to make integration possible with minimal impact on customer IT resources.”

Organizations that use a mix of enterprise cloud applications and on-premise, plant-specific systems face plenty of challenges, Sinnott said. EHS data comes from numerous devices and systems, including ERP, HR, historians, lab systems, mobile devices, IoT devices, and sensors. To make matters worse, just like taxes, governmental regulatory reports change frequently and with little warning. This makes quickly updating software critical to helping customers control change management costs.

Many competitors offer on-premise solutions or hosted offerings of those same solutions. This approach creates a huge expense for integration, version change control, and slower functional innovation. Taking advantage of Enviance’s API and new features require no data migrations, IT upgrades, or user retraining.

“IT leaders also told us that our mobility strategy must be
able to access information at any time, location, and on any
device, and work connected or offline,” Sinnott said. “EHS
professionals rely on mobile access and capturing data at any
time. Enviance has embraced progressive web app technologies
to deliver a rich mobile user experience with an easy delivery,
update, and management model. No matter what device you
use, the user experience is consistent across platforms, which
streamlines the learning curve for operating within the system.”

Analytics is another critical area of focus for IT leaders and their EHS customers, Sinnott said. EHS, operations, and sustainability teams need the ability to use that data in any way they require while connecting back to their other software and analysis tools. Enviance can query any data for truly flexible real-time data access.

The importance of cost-effective, sustainable integration is better understood from a case study. AEP, one of the largest electric energy companies in the U.S., has linked the Enviance Management System to key emissions and fuel databases, including the company’s continuous emissions monitoring systems, opacity monitoring systems, and AEP’s custom application for fuel management. The integrated system and its task management and calendaring functions allow AEP to monitor, report, and analyze emissions, including CO2 emissions from its nearly 26GW of owned generation.