5 Characteristics of EHS Software Applications
Many analysts, researchers, and professional organizations published reports about EHS applications. These reports include valuable information on market trends and buyer preferences. Each Evotix report provides a unique perspective on environmental management tools , the Safety and Health , but there are usual Suspects regarding the most popular features. Almost all reports show that buyers want capabilities for incident reporting, audit management, security management, environmental compliance, etc.
Any type of change can potentially create a risk of an adverse event, such as a worker injury or an environmental incident. To reduce the risk of incidents, a change introduced in the workplace must be properly managed through workflows that follow approvals, validations and notifications. Appropriate approvers should review the change, assess whether there are incident risks, identify steps to mitigate potential risks, and ensure that all affected personnel are notified. Managing change requests and checklists manually is time consuming and presents the risk of human error. Using a Change Management solution offers a better approach.
Changes can introduce potential risks of non-compliance, operational inefficiencies, workplace incidents, and equipment failure. An EHS management platform that includes MOC functionality can help mitigate these risks.
Contractor Safety
Organizations that use contractors have as much responsibility for the safety of contract workers as their own workers. Additionally, the safety performance of a contractor has a direct impact on the safety performance of the contracting organization. The result is that any incident or security management system should ideally include functionality for the security of the contractor.
First, contractors can report incidents, near misses, and observations in the same EHS Software used by the contracting company. This also applies to a mobile security app. Second, the platform would distinguish between the data entered by the contractors and the data entered by the contracting organization. This allows safety performance to be measured overall, just for the contracting organization and for each individual contractor. Third, contractors can be evaluated for safety performance based on incidents or other metrics, allowing organizations to evaluate contractors for future projects.
There are other uses for a contractor’s safety app, such as getting contractors to acknowledge company safety policies and storing documents submitted by contractors about their safety performance. The increasing use of contractors is a reality for many companies today, and it is a reality that must be reflected in the EHS software system.
Data Quality Controls
For asset intensive industries (for example, oil refineries) that have to measure air emissions to comply with air quality regulations or improve environmental performance, there may be millions of air emission data records to capture in total, at the facility level and all the way down to each computer. Unfortunately, the more data that is collected, the greater the risk of inaccuracies and data quality issues. For many processes, such as air emissions calculations, data collection and data quality must go hand in hand. It is not enough to collect large amounts of data. There must also be validations and checks to ensure that the data is accurate before being processed for calculations, reports, etc.