Monitoring environmental impacts by tracking sustainability KPIs is essential for any business that wants to improve or report on environmental performance. But, from a financial perspective, how these environmental metrics are tracked is as important as the fact they are tracked. Results increasingly show a software-based EMS is the most effective way of improving environmental performance and boosting revenue.

Environmental management has been overcomplicated in recent years, and business leaders often feel overwhelmed by the perceived array of complex requirements associated with environmental performance. But it is actually quite simple. On a rudimentary level, it involves tracking and reporting on four critical metrics: waste and wastewater output, water usage, and air emissions. After analyzing these factors, a business can develop and implement new policies to mitigate its environmental impacts and save money. 

But the most substantial savings of environment management arises from the implementation of a software-based EMS. The return on investment (ROI) from a system that tracks, analyzes and reports on all of the metrics associated with your environment program can be enormous, and manifests in a number of ways:

• Efficiency: Environment management personnel commit a substantial amount of time and effort to basic tasks, including the collection, assessment and reporting of environmental data. These are all elements of an environment program that can be streamlined through software. For example, consider all the time an environment manager or full-time equivalent spends manually inputting data into a traditional spreadsheet program, assessing the data and generating reports based on the data. The right software will allow staff across all locations to input the four critical environmental metrics into a web-based platform and automate the processes of assessing and collecting data.
• Risk Avoidance: Often businesses face substantial fines from permit violations as a result of poor management of wastewater output and air emissions. A robust software-based EMS is capable or correlating real-time emissions and wastewater statistics to permit thresholds and issuing automatic email notifications to warn environment management personnel that a permit violation is likely or imminent. This allows a business to proactively manage emissions sources and discharge points to ensure permitted tolerances are not exceeded and costly fines are avoided.
• Brand Image: As the world becomes more environment-conscious, the value of a legitimate, environmentally progressive brand image is substantial. But the perception of a progressive environmental agenda is only as effective as the environment program supporting it. A software-based EMS will curb the amount of time spent on the minutiae of managing an environment program, freeing up time for environment managers to focus on improving environmental performance by implementing aggressive sustainability policies. Also, real-time access corporate environment KPIs and live reporting capabilities will enable a resort to prove its environmental performance with current data at any point.

A robust software solution will also provide cost savings associated with continual audit preparedness, the elimination of duplicate data, and the tracking of (and automatic following-up on) corrective actions. Further, environment management software is the most effective and efficient means of implementing and maintaining a robust EMS as well as ensuring continued compliance with regulatory and legislative standards.

We’ll conclude our discussion on Integrated Management Systems by looking at the supposed ‘Holy Grail’ of business management: a management system that goes many steps further than simply EHS and quality concerns, and is applied across all business lines, even those outside EHS and Quality realms. This would be a truly integrated management system that could cover areas such as corporate governance, sustainability…basically any business processes and activities.

For example, document control, Corporate Social Responsibility, auditing, and training could be governed along the same integrated management standards. According to Robert Pojasek’s 2006 article in Environment Quality Management, one synergistic or ‘umbrella’ system could enable an organization to ensure the quality of its products...and demonstrate that those products are consistent with the organization’s vision, mission, core values and objectives.”

This idea is based on the premise that, by some means or other, all business activities overlap with some other (if not all other) business activities, so rather than treating each consideration as a watertight compartment, apply the same form of a management system across all

The basic integration of ISHQ considerations could open the gateway to a holistic and synergistic approach to all business concerns, but this can be an ambitious and sometimes fruitless endeavour if the business in question is not of a size and scope necessary to warrant facing the logistical challenges demanded by such an organizational shift.

As mentioned, the essential message is that businesses shouldn’t integrate systems for the sake of integration, but rather when a clear business benefit of integration is identified. That said, if the end goal is a seamless, organization-wide management system, keep scalability at the top of your mind as you evaluate management system options, including software solutions.

For a company over-anxious to reconcile EHS and Quality processes and data, some complications may emerge.

For example, some integrated management opponents argue that strict adherence to one specific set of standards can be sacrificed in the name of integration. That is, in defining a broad-base of widely applicable standards to enforce across all EHS and Quality domains, some details are institutionally enabled to slip through the cracks.

Really, it all depends on what specifically a company is attempting to integrate. For example, getting managers across all departments to employ the same audit checklists and reports can be like mixing apples and oranges. However, leveraging the same auditing software that allows the importing of individual EHS and quality checklists can reduce costs.

The standards governing quality can be far removed from those governing environment, health and safety. However, this notion can be a very particular function of a particular corporate culture and which aspect (of EHS and Quality) has the greatest impact within that corporate culture.

Further, an old paradigm suggests some aspects of environment, health and safety are not tied intrinsically to aspects of quality, such as continual improvement in performance, legislative compliance and considerations of risks.

This has changed somewhat as businesses constantly try to improve their environment, health and safety performance. Historically these concerns have been dominated by legislation, and quality, by and large, has been customer-driven. Now environment, health and safety are being strongly influenced by brand impact, and quality is being influenced by new consumer protection legislation.

Some IMS critics a suggest integrated systems can actually make audits more complex. However, having an IMS places no demand on any company to fulfill a comprehensive EHS and Quality audit each time an audit is conducted. Rather, businesses need to asses where overlap exists and where it makes good business sense to combine elements. We'll discuss more about this in our conclusion.

A consideration of the relative advantages and disadvantages of an IMS is a sound starting point to evaluate whether the time has come to integrate management platforms, or whether integration would generate no immediate or long-term payoff.

• Cost efficiency: The aforementioned standards share several common requirements, including document control, auditing and training. An obvious cost-reduction arises when a business addresses each of these areas with shared software and processes. Also, registrars tend to provide discounts when they are able to audit two or more management systems together, as opposed to one at a time.
• Time efficiency: While the logistics of implementing an IMS may be complicated at the onset, the relative simplicity of managing EHSQ systems together on an ongoing basis will ultimately save time and frustration.
• Corporate Brand: Most Businesses understand that a negative EHSQ ‘event’ (for example, a spill, a product recall or an employee injury) can have a significant impact on corporate brand—and share price. Applying the same standards to each area by way of an IMS significantly curbs the risk of any such event.
• Collaboration: An IMS reduces the silos of information that typically haunt most organizations. Key data can be selectively shared across an organization thereby reducing risk (e.g., associated with the use of hazardous materials), while better capitalizing on opportunities.

While the likely benefits of EHS and quality management integration are substantial, an IMS is not for every business. In Monday's post, we'll look at some of the complications that can arise from IMS implementation, as well as the business benefits that arise from implementing the right IMS.

Though environment, health, safety (EHS) and quality management issues are often handled by individual management systems, the guiding principles behind each of these areas share a common link — W. Edwards Deming. The American quality guru is most commonly associated with the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, an iterative problem-solving process used to resolve quality issues and improve business performance. But it is important to remember the foremost EHS and quality management standards — including ISO14001 (environment), OSHAS 18000 (health and safety) and ISO 9001 (quality) — are all rooted in the PDCA or Deming Cycle.

Businesses that encounter regular overlap between these areas ought to consider the potential benefits of an Integrated Management System (IMS). An IMS coordinates all of an organization's procedures, systems and processes within one complete framework and, in an ideal scenario, allows the organization to operate as a seamless whole, with unified objectives across all departments.

But a fulsome IMS is not for every company. Any business of any size does not necessarily stand to benefit from adopting an integrated management system. Instead, businesses should integrate management systems not just for the sake of integration, but where there is a clear business benefit that can be tied to integration. The principle benefits of integrated EHS and quality management include both cost-effectiveness and collaboration between intrinsically related EHSQ concerns.

Imagine a business that uses a hypothetical hazardous material in the manufacture of a product at one of its plants and consider how this hazardous material can create near equally significant issues within each EHS and quality realm:

• Environment: The hazardous material may be toxic to the environment at large and necessitate consideration within the organization’s air emissions monitoring.
• Health and Safety: The same hazardous material may compromise the health or directly endanger the lives of employees in the plant.
• Quality: The handling and use of the hazardous material may be governed explicitly by existing quality standards.

As an example, consider last year’s string of recalls associated with the cadmium content in children’s toys manufactured in China. The extended direct exposure of factory workers to the highly toxic heavy metal would necessitate an internal health and safety policy governing safe exposure and use. Also, given the targeted end user of the toys are children, quality management mechanisms would have to ensure the cadmium content of the toys did not exceed federally regulated maximums affecting the markets in which the product would be sold. But further, since improperly disposed cadmium is known to leech into and contaminate groundwater, provisions would have to be put into place to ensure proper disposal of the material at the plant level.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss the pros and cons of implementing an IMS.

Ever have a tough time selling a software solution to your boss you know will make a huge difference to your organization?

Well, this isn't an uncommon thing. It's always difficult to convince those that hold the purse strings in any organization to loose themselves of the funds you so dearly need to streamline your processes; to escape the Notes, the spreadsheets, and the disparate documents and systems of the world to reconcile all information in one system.

If these concerns echo with you at all, check out a recent article in Pollution Engineering, penned by Intelex's Paul Leavoy.

It describes the opportunities and challenges that face any EHS manager as he or her pursues the approval of senior management's approval of a software solution that will help streamline processes and generate ROI.

Let us know what you think!

We've covered the importance of developing a proactive plan, quantifying financial gains, understanding the role of metrics, and using software to manage your sustainability program for the most effective results.

Today let's talk about the often overlooked element of a winning sustainability program: communicating your progress.

5. Communicate Commitment/Performance to Stakeholders: While the primary function of sustainability initiatives will be the returns they deliver through conservation efforts and a number of other cost-savings effects, don’t miss the boat on the wealth of opportunities that accompany clearly communicating sustainability efforts and accomplishments to stakeholders. When developing a sustainability strategy, consider incorporating an ongoing sustainability reporting plan that conforms to existing frameworks (such as the IIRC, GRI and others).

While some critics have complained that comprehensive sustainability reporting can dominate resources and distract from essential business operations, proper planning, resource allocation and the use of software solutions (with configurable reporting capabilities) can render reporting a seamless and automatic process.

Even before sustainability benchmarks have been achieved, once a commitment to sustainable development has been solidified by way of a documented sustainability strategy, an organization can begin touting its agenda. The marketing, publicity, sales and customer relations benefits that flow from flaunting environmental, social and financial sustainability are too substantial to ignore.

In closing

We hope you've enjoyed our overview of the elements we believe are integral to a successful sustainability strategy. Please share your thoughts with us! We've barely scratched the surface of what can be a nuanced, multilayered file, but we've tried to provide some beginner-level guidance to the uninitiated organization that aspires to be more sustainable. 

As a parting thought, do not fall into the trap many newcomers to the sustainability game find themselves in by being either overly ambitious or forgetting to frame priorities accurately. Remember that your organization is a business first and foremost: instead of framing your business priorities in terms of environmental issues, frame environmental issues in terms of your business priorities.

So far in our week-long discussion on building a successful sustainability strategy, we’ve reviewed the importance of developing a proactive plan, quantifying financial gains, and understanding the role of metrics.

Now let’s turn our attention to another critical aspect and something that’s dear to our hearts at Intelex: the role of software. Yes, it could be argued we’re more than marginally invested in the role software plays in sustainability, but we still deeply believe it is an essential part of building an effective program.

4. Use Software to Track Metrics and Forecast: Certainly, though conventional paper- and spreadsheet-based platforms can be and are used to track environmental, social and economic performance, the advantage of integrated software solutions over such archaic means is undisputable.

In particular, some configurable software products already geared towards streamlining the management of EHS systems can be extended to cover most if not all aspects of a complete sustainability program.

Moreover, some systems are prepared to capture, correlate, assess and automatically report on sustainability data, eliminating the time and effort spent on manual data collection, entry and assessment by employees—personnel that could most likely focus their energy on improving the caliber and scope of your sustainability program.

By automating the assessment and reporting on key sustainability metrics with software, organizations can analyze trends and forecast to streamline the allocation of resources and identify potential weaknesses in their sustainability programs and, critically, cut costs.

We’ve discussed the value of a proactive strategy and quantifying financial gains in building a sustainability strategy.

Today we’ll look at another critical component of a sustainability strategy that is the heart of the adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

3. Understand the Role of Metrics: Before you make your first step into the world of sustainability – before you install that first compact fluorescent lightbulb – it’s imperative to understand you need to know where you’re at.

Along the lines of the lightbulb example above, it can be as simple as starting with an energy audit of your plants, offices, sites and other business units. If you know where you’re at, you can begin to set goals and targets, key elements of any successful sustainability strategy. The progress achieved through each action and each campaign within your sustainability strategy will be much more significant if they can be measured against where you were at when you launched your strategy.

Without defined, tracked sustainability metrics, you have no sustainability program. Not only will you be unable to monitor the success of sustainability initiatives and continually improve sustainability performance, you won’t be able to tie such initiatives to ROI and you won’t be able to share your track record with stakeholders.

Yesterday we discussed the role of developing a proactive plan in building a successful sustainability strategy.

Today is all about a term CFOs, VPs, Directors, executive team members  like to hear a lot: ROI.

2. Calculate the ROI: You may have achieved the buy-in of senior management, or your CEO may have provided a clear mandate to undertake sustainable development initiatives. Either way, acknowledge sustainability programs are an investment and spell-out in clear, concrete terms the tangible ROI a sustainability strategy will generate on a short- and long-term basis.

As suggested above, some indirect savings values will be coloured by probabilities and expressed as ranges. However, an honest, comprehensive breakdown — which can be developed in-house or facilitated by a consultant or software solutions provider in many cases — will give your organization a clear analysis of what gains can be expected from the adoption of a comprehensive sustainable development program.

As the years roll on, your organization can compare actual data against ROI expectations to tweak its sustainability program for the most effective results.