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EHS & Quality: Four Key Challenges Facing Environmental Professionals

Environmental Professionals

Environmental professionals are tasked with managing compliance of state/provincial and federal environmental regulations and laws. They must be able to assess risk in the workplace and develop and implement proactive measures that help prevent Environmental incidents from happening in the first place. They must also be able to track, investigate and manage various Environmental events and incidents when non-compliance issues arise. Lastly, Environmental managers need a single system of record to be able to track and analyze data and generate reports.

To see if you can relate, I grouped these challenges into four key issues that we see in Environmental Management Systems:

  1. Task management:

Is it difficult for you to track regulatory permit requirements and assign worksite assessments and corrective actions to employees, supervisors, and environmental colleagues? Is it difficult or time consuming to follow up on the status of these tasks?  Can you run reports that summarize where each of these tasks are in the process, who’s doing what, what’s due when, and if you’re on track?

Audits & inspections:

Are you still conducting your audits and inspections with pen and paper? Are you missing critical warnings due to comments or findings being filed in a drawer or taking too long to re-write each inspection into a database? Are you certain that your audit and inspection programs are aligned with the most current Environmental laws and regulations?

Incidents:

Can you easily track Environmental incidents such as spills, permit violations, and endangered species takes? Can you identify the root cause of why an incident occurred to prevent it from happening again?

Proactive risk assessment:

Can you track, analyze, and act on leading indicators? Can you assess Environmental risks at a job, process, or task level? Can you quickly identify your Environmental risks using risk matrices? Can you use data to develop proactive programs that avoid, minimize, or mitigate Environmental impacts from your operations?

Metrics:

Can you track, analyze, and aggregate key Environmental metric data at any level across your organization? Can you easily access key metric data for any calendar or fiscal period? Can you quickly view your organization’s performance objectives and targets and compare these against actual results?

If these challenges sound familiar, we invite you to find out how Cority’s Environmental Management Software can help you overcome your challenges.