The fact that global spend on EHS management software is projected to reach $3.1 billion by 2028 underlines just how huge the industry has become. More organizations than ever before are driving their processes through digital means – but why exactly?
This blog will help describe exactly what EHS management software offers, what makes it such a desired tool in an organization’s EHS arsenal, and the top five reasons why unified, multi-tenant SaaS EHS management software platforms are so desirable for organizations looking to consolidate and digitize their EHS practices.
What is EHS management software?
To accurately define EHS management software, we need to first define EHS management. This is pretty easy: EHS management is a framework for businesses to address the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) practices of their organization. This can be expanded into the general practice of keeping workers, their workspaces, and the environment around them safe. Organizations design specific programs, workflows and objectives to oversee the way these principles are administered.
Let’s break EHS into its three key parts and define their distinct objectives:
Environmental:
Focuses on processes that interact with environmental factors. For most organizations, goals will center on mitigating negative environmental impacts, and will include processes to manage wastes, chemical substances, air emissions and water usage.
Health:
Encompasses systems designed to monitor, preserve and promote staff health & wellbeing. This is a huge, multifaceted discipline, covering everything from occupational health, wellness, industrial hygiene and ergonomics.
Safety:
Involves the implementation of programs and systems to identify and safeguard workers from risks that, if left uncontrolled, could result in physical harm. Worker safety covers everything from managing compliance obligations, controlling risks with tasks, or examining and resolving the causes of adverse events that have occurred to ensure they don’t happen again.
Quality & Sustainability:
Though not represented by a letter in the acronym, ‘EHS’ may also include Quality and Sustainability domains. Quality management describes a system of activities designed to deliver a service, product, or other output at a desired level of excellence, consistency and reliability. Sustainability, in turn, governs the breadth of inputs, processes and outputs of an organization to ensure it can operate in a responsible and sustainable manner, considering environmental, social and governance factors.
EHS management software is software designed to easily and effectively implement and manage EHS management systems. In short, an EHS management system defines the roles, processes and responsibilities for all of the above practices. From the day-to-day actions of workers to the wider impact their work has on the environment surrounding them, EHS management systems are designed to streamline processes, make them reliably replicable for workers, and ensure the procedures and data required for these processes are easily accessible.
What makes EHS management so important?
Like so many drivers in modern business – it all comes down to data. Whether we’re talking about words written on a page or a modern data center, data makes EHS management tick. However, the digitization of these processes transforms the way this data is captured, housed, and utilized – in turn, transforming our concept of data.
First and foremost, EHS management software provides a central location for EHS data. Instead of insights being captured on paper and stored in a filing cabinet, never to be seen again, information is open to anyone with access to their organization’s IT landscape. Digitization can help to centralize and automate data collection efforts, making any number of tasks easier to complete, improving data quality control, and enhancing overarching EHS processes.
Furthermore, mobile-enabled solutions enable workers to collect and report data – anywhere, anytime – further improving the speed of data collection and information sharing, and augmenting organization-wide EHS visibility. Mobile accessibility not only eliminates unnecessary administrative burdens from workers’ plates associated with data transcription and manual key entry, but also ensures workers have the information and tools they need at their fingertips to make informed, data-driven decisions wherever they are.
Who needs EHS management software?
Effective EHS management begins with understanding organizational risks. In the multiple pillars of EHS, professionals are looking to identify, assess, control and resolve risks encountered by their workforce and their wider community. This can be boiled down to a simple truth: if an organization can identify risk, then it can benefit from a thorough EHS management program that properly deals with the identification and prevention of risk.
As EHS regulations grow in volume and complexity, EHS professionals often rely on EHS management software to support programs they rely upon to periodically assess compliance and address identified non-compliance issues. Additionally, the complex and constantly evolving world we live in means comprehensive reporting is vital not just for adhering to regulations or meeting stakeholder demands, but to also gain a better understanding of what’s going on in EHS operations across our organizational footprint.
Successfully adapting to emerging risks involves adept change management, robust training initiatives, and stringent operational compliance. By implementing forward-thinking strategies, supported through digital solutions to foresee and mitigate risks, organizations can achieve the flexibility necessary to adapt and grow in response to dynamic business environments.
What are the five key reasons why unified, multi-tenant SaaS EHS management software is preferable
Reducing siloed data and disparate systems
Even organizations that have digitized their process away from paper-based methodologies can suffer from siloed data. This is what happens when an organization uses multiple, disparate systems to support different EHS processes or domains, rather than unifying all branches of EHS under one ecosystem. Choosing an EHS management software that unifies your data and prioritizes a collective workplace helps to diminish data siloing. By doing so, workers have access to the data they need regardless of physical location, improving communication between teams, creating more efficient workflows and improving the overall working environment.
Greater efficiency and ease of use
By deploying a single application for an entire organization to tackle EHS related issues, various approaches can be trimmed into streamlined workflows that treat workers’ time as the valuable asset it is. The best EHS management software solutions prioritize efficiency and highlight the similarities between workflows, taking less time to complete and enabling on-the-go data analysis. Better yet, world-class EHS management software will apply consistent user experience across desktop mobile platforms, as well as any auxiliary applications.
Increased employee engagement
Following this trend, EHS management software helps to democratize EHS, putting the power to make the workplace safer in the hands of those using the system. Users can see their impact in real time through data reporting and visualization options right on their devices.
Compliance
The rate of change within the EHS compliance landscape is incredibly fast-paced and often difficult to keep track of, leaving those tasked with keeping on top of it burdened with outdated and risky. EHS management software can act as a central repository for all compliance-related information and simplifies access and analysis for EHS professionals, executives, and compliance officers.
This can help to alleviate some of the legwork included in assessing and maintaining regulatory compliance by retaining the most recent standards as benchmarks, or at least notify relevant stakeholders of any major changes they should be aware of. More directly, the powerful controls and ability to generate defensible, accurate reports can prove compliance to regulators with confidence. This not only saves potentially millions in fines but also protects the company’s reputation.
The power of multi-tenant true-SaaS software
Not every vendor of EHS Management Software can fulfil this final promise – but those that can offer something truly special. We’ve written at length about what True-SaaS is, its benefits are rooted in continuous innovation, security, agility, and scalability. Organizations utilizing EHS Software Management with a True-SaaS model deal with far easier upgrades, opening the most up-to-date version of their software every time they boot-up their machines without tedious and timely upgrade procedures facing customers utilizing custom-code products. Additionally, multi-tenant architectures that keep all customers on the same software version and allow customer environments to be upgraded automatically without additional projects and costs ensure organizations stay at the forefront of technology development, while lowering the total cost of software ownership.
Learning More About Digital Transformation
Digital transformation and EHS Software Management enable connected workers, ensuring they have the information they need, wherever and whenever. In our recent webinar, Digital Transformation – Taking Advantage of Centralization, Speed, and Transparency, Carrie Young, VP of Strategic Solutions at Cority reviewed the tools and techniques required to ensure successful digital transformation. This included examples of how to leverage centralization, speed, and transparency within overall project management for Incident Management workflows.
