Managing Environmental Liabilities
Whether you monitor discharges from power plants, assess remediation at contaminated sites, or evaluate chemical plants’ environmental performance, you likely work with subcontractors for sampling, analysis, validation, and reporting.
Environmental managers need to proactively manage liabilities and optimize performance by identifying trends and addressing potential issues before they escalate. The increasing volume of data collected by subcontractors presents a challenge for businesses, requiring effective management practices.
Although subcontractors or consultants provide a full range of environmental services, allowing industrial and public-sector clients to outsource various tasks, the business entity typically retains liability and risk, not the third parties.
Common Issues When Working with Multiple Contractors
Although a single vendor contract may be preferable, changing business requirements and complex environmental programs often force businesses to outsource to multiple vendors. The environmental market now includes local boutique consultancies and medium to large multinational companies offering a wide range of services. It is the business’s responsibility to maximize the value generated from different contractors.
Often, multiple contractors perform similar data management tasks at different sites or times, using various processes to generate data deliverables. This leads to inconsistencies across a portfolio of sites over time. Common examples include:
- Varying sampling processes
- Inconsistent quality control metrics
- Multiple reporting and analysis formats
Managing high volumes of data can be challenging when comparing laboratory reports from different vendors.
The variation among consultants makes it essential for businesses to take ownership of all environmental data management processes. Standardizing and overseeing these processes ensures data quality and helps manage liabilities.
Establishing a Central Data Repository
Establishing a central data repository significantly enhances the control of environmental datasets collected by various parties. Implementing EarthSoft’s data management system, EQuIS, as a centralized, enterprise-wide system provides the following benefits:
Improved Data Quality
Poor quality data is costly, not only financially, but also in terms of risk management, reputation loss, and missed opportunities. Installing EQuIS enterprise-wide allows you to define data quality standards while eliminating redundant and siloed datasets.
Reviewing the current state of data is often a complex task when implementing any data management system. Can you confidently locate any dataset collected at your sites over the last 10 years? Chances are your data is spread across multiple consultants who use various databases, spreadsheets, reports, and other documents. Basing decisions on these disparate sets of information poses a significant risk in today’s data-driven world.
EQuIS eliminates these challenges by enforcing consistent quality standards on all datasets and data submitters, enabling you, as the data owner, to make confident decisions with the data.
Efficient Communication with Regulators
We operate in a heavily regulated environment where authorities require routine and regular reporting of program data against regulatory standards. Implementing EQuIS as a central system with standardized and automated processing and reporting simplifies the process of meeting permit requirements and other obligations.
Regulatory requests become even more complicated when they involve historical datasets.
Can you respond to these queries efficiently?
- Provide all water levels measured in the last 10 years at the river near your plant.
- Provide all VOC and BTEX concentrations of soil samples collected in 2011.
- Provide a list of all inspections and remedied defects for 250 monitoring wells in 2009.
Often, the data owner (who pays for all this data) cannot answer these questions without involving the contractors who collected and still own the data. This complicates communication within the organization and with authorities. Additionally, retrieving and compiling data from various sources can delay responses to authorities. Storing the data in EQuIS as a centralized repository allows for querying based on requested specifications within moments.
Improved Collaboration
Environmental management of a multi-facility portfolio can be conducted at the site level by individual managers or at the corporate level by a central management team. Consolidating all related tasks in the EQuIS Environmental Data Management System (EDMS) and avoiding siloed management allows the company to make better business decisions. Storing all data in a central system makes it easy to compare the environmental performance of multiple sites and run queries across all sites independently of consultants.
Environmental monitoring and reporting requirements often necessitate consolidating data from multiple contractors into a single set of reports. You might work with a specialized contractor for biological surveys while another contractor provides groundwater field measurements. Combining these datasets and having all parties work on the same system simplifies collaboration, allowing you to focus on gaining new insights.
Reduced Management Costs
According to a study by EarthSoft client, the US Department of Energy (US DOE), information management accounts for 35% of long-term project management costs. Using EQuIS to manage data reduces costs throughout the data lifecycle by automating repetitive tasks and enabling environmental managers to analyze data efficiently.
Defined standards for field data collection, data transfers, inputs, and report generation allow smaller teams to handle larger datasets, leading to savings as observed by the US DOE. Another EarthSoft client, a building materials company, reported that they would need to hire an additional 4-8 people if all monitoring data were not managed with a central data management solution.
Standardizing Projects and Workflows
Controlling various environmental projects at sites becomes more challenging when multiple external contractors are involved. By taking ownership of project processes and associated data, organizations can gain a new level of control, allowing them to manage contractors efficiently.
Efficient Planning and Tracking
Standardization begins at the planning phase of any project. EQuIS provides tools to plan environmental projects on a centrally accessible calendar. Sampling plans, laboratory contracts, and reporting requirements are defined, securely stored, and monitored to track project progress. Data managers can track sampling campaigns for completeness and monitor any issues with laboratories or sampling teams.
Data Transfers
Another part of the environmental information management process with significant potential for standardization is the storage and transfer of raw data. Raw data is often stored in various formats, complicating the efficient conversion of this data into useful information. Standardizing the data format in EQuIS ensures every contractor follows your data structure. Including standard formats for data transfers ensures all data is loaded identically, using the same validation rules.
Standardized data deliverables enable you to establish an electronic data transfer process where new datasets are validated and loaded automatically. As the environmental manager, you can choose to receive email notifications when a new dataset is uploaded or monitor deliverables on a web dashboard.
Reporting and Data Analysis
Outsourcing data analysis and report creation, such as charts, maps, tables, or diagrams, often leads to inconsistent outputs and challenges in deriving the required information. EQuIS standardizes reports and analysis outputs for any project, eliminating many of these issues.
EQuIS provides tools to standardize and automate common reporting requirements, allowing the organization to control the process. Data analysis can still be outsourced, but contractors work in a controlled environment with predefined reporting layouts and quality criteria. Reports are accessible to the client data manager, who can review outputs and data visualizations in a user-friendly interface.