Enviance Blog

MSDS: Chemical Management best practices for EHS teams

For environment, health and safety (EHS) professionals, chemical management is of utmost importance, especially in light of the increasing global regulations emerging in the industry.

In 2008, chemicals and chemical products were the source of 15,220 non-fatal occupational injuries and illnesses in the U.S. – 34 percent of these exposures/injuries resulted in six or more days away from work for the affected employees, while 10 percent resulted in 31 or more days. The cost factor alone indicates how important a role chemical management plays when it comes to an organization’s bottom line.

Scott Williams, director of sales for Sitehawk, a leading innovator in MSDS online solutions, recently shared best practices in our educational webinar on chemical management. Scott shares how companies can leverage EHS data to manage their chemical management risks, and covers the following:

• Goals – why it’s important to have chemical management best practices
• Methodologies, factors, tool and techniques you can use
• Real world case studies where implementations have resulted in very successful ROI
• Action plans/blueprints for moving forward with your own chemical management strategies

The approach to this issue is hopefully becoming more proactive; you should really determine if you are only worried about a potential OSHA audit today, or more worried about the impact of your chemical use today, and even later down the road in 20 years.

During this webinar, you’ll gain a better understanding of what your chemical hazard footprint is while uncovering various considerations to take into account in chemical management, including those associated with safety, regulatory compliance, cost and risk reduction, and sustainability initiatives.

Listen to the webinar here.

 

Do more with less: one-stop environmental platform benefits

Typically, companies deploy a different solution for each of their environmental management needs. Need to measure greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)? Get software for GHG management. Need to report waste? Buy another solution that can measure and report waste. It makes sense, right?

Not so much.

As environmental guidelines become more complex, implementation of various solutions – either developed in-house or purchased externally – to meet regulatory needs is proving cumbersome for companies. Acquiring or building these technology solutions for management of a single environmental type is costly. Companies are significantly overpaying for too many systems that cannot integrate with their infrastructure, or even communicate with each other to convey the organization’s overall environmental performance.

To address these challenges, we just released a new white paper entitled “More Bang, Less Bucks: Why One-Stop Environmental Systems Make Better Sense,” which explores the business benefits and value of using one environmental enterprise resource planning (EERP) platform. This paper demonstrates how a one-stop, comprehensive environmental ERP system can meet all of an organization’s environmental management needs, by:

• Providing a single, centralized platform for organizations to manage ALL of their environmental programs;
• Offering economies of scale, enabling more thorough analysis of environmental data across an organization;
• Creating the foundation required to manage one, or even 20 or more environmental initiatives as the need arises.

In this whitepaper, you’ll uncover many other benefits made possible by the use of a single environmental system, pertaining to both IT and business settings across an organization. In an era where environmental solutions are required for regulatory purposes, it’s crucial for companies to find the most all-inclusive system that will meet their needs, while saving time and money to reduce the bottom line.

Read white paper here.

19th Annual EHS Management Forum just days away, will Enviance see you there?

This week, October 19-20, the Enviance team will be exhibiting at the largest annual gathering for EHS decision makers: The EHS Management Forum. This year’s NAEM forum will revolve around EHS excellence, covering topics such as defining and delivering sustainability, supply chain strategies, and 21st Century Leadership.

Nigel Nugent, vice president of worldwide sales, will be in attendance for Enviance. Nigel recently took part in the Enviance webinar, “Mandatory x Voluntary: Creating an Environmental Compliance Culture of Value”, along with Andrea Gardner, senior technologist for CH2M HILL, and Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz. The topics discussed at the webinar, specially how companies are taking an integrated approach to environmental compliance and sustainability efforts will all be prevalent themes at this year’s EHS Management Forum.    

If you will be attending the show and haven’t yet seen the Mandatory x Voluntary webinar, check it out and then stop by the Enviance Booth (#26) to say hello to Nigel and hear more about the exciting work Enviance is doing to help its customers reach their environmental compliance goals.

Enviance System 6.5: Your personalized and intuitive environmental ERP system

On Wednesday, October 12, we released the newest version of our environmental ERP solution, Enviance System 6.5.

In general, most vendor product upgrades come with a list of new features that are meant to increase efficiency and streamline operations. But in reality, most new capabilities and the modified user interfaces simply confuse users; leading to a frustrating process where less time is devoted to completing tasks and more time is devoted to familiarizing yourself with a new system.  

Our team went to great lengths to ensure that the new features offered in Enviance System 6.5 were presented in a natural and familiar manner. These changes were customer-driven and customer-led, incorporating the feedback we heard from our customers and partners at our annual User Conference and through customer beta testing. Our goal was to make this system just as approachable to casual, non-technical users, as it is for many of you, the savvy regulatory experts.  

We hope this goal was accomplished with the addition of user friendly features like Quick Links—a more intuitive and direct path to data entry that allows users to circumvent unnecessary areas of the system and move directly into daily data entry responsibilities.

We also enhanced our workflow capabilities to let you map your most complex business processes in the Enviance System. This allows the people on the EERP front lines to create a consistent and auditable trail of data, protecting themselves from the risk of data duplication and error.

Enviance is proud of the changes we’ve made to the system and we are confident that users of all levels will feel comfortable using it.

Learn more about the new Enviance System 6.5 and what our customer and partners have to say about our new features, here.

Optimizing the cloud to meet your needs

In the tech-savvy world we live in, “the cloud” is everywhere we turn. Often touted for helping businesses reduce costs while improving their flexibility and mobility, cloud computing may be the big buzzword of the year, but most people are still unaware of how to take advantage of it to gain tangible benefits.

One example illustrating what cloud computing can truly offer: organizations evaluating strategies for measuring, monitoring and reporting their environmental data can leverage the cloud to better implement environmental monitoring software.  

Reporting, a major part of regulatory compliance and key in improving a company’s sustainability, can happen in real-time with exceptional accuracy when using cloud-based software. This is possible since you’re no longer depending on a developer to modify a traditional corporate report on a database server. Also, since cloud-based software allows users from across the organization to collaborate, reports and dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs) are available for the group to share and view, regardless of their locations. The collaborative feature is so helpful that many vendors are considering using it across their client organizations as a way to lower costs for both vendors and suppliers.    

These advantages, along with best practices on how cloud computing can be used for business transformation, data consolidation and improving interoperability as well as scalability, are further explored in Enviance’s recently published white paper “The Cloudburst: Hitting New Heights with Cloud-Based Environmental Software”.  

In this whitepaper, you’ll uncover business benefits of cloud- or web-based software as well as advantages of managing environmental data “in the cloud”. Check it out here.