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If you work in highly regulated industries such as chemical manufacturing, electric utilities, and industrial manufacturing, not having institutional knowledge or visibility to the right data can put your business at risk of non-compliance. Coupled with the risk of expensive penalties and reputational damage, there truly is no room for error when it comes to regulatory EHS compliance.
Or more specifically, environmental compliance.
To help protect the environment, regulators and the general public expect companies to always be in compliance with all applicable state and federal laws, regulations, and permit obligations. Companies should additionally develop proactive environmental compliance strategies to both protect and improve the communities in which they operate.
Failure to do so exposes companies to civil penalties from agencies, possible litigation, and, potentially, negative public relations and community standing.
For many environmental teams, digital transformation projects seem to be continually “in progress” or waiting to filter down to them. This has left teams with the usual hodgepodge of low-tech solutions to manage compliance obligations, primarily spreadsheets, emails, and unsupported homegrown applications. This shoestring approach adds to the risk of non-compliance significantly.
In addition, the ability to preserve and share institutional knowledge is difficult if not impossible without a centralized solution. Do you have a plan to address employee turnover to ensure there are no missed compliance obligations? How do you onboard new employees so they can quickly understand what’s occurring across operations, and then transfer vital historical knowledge about facilities to them?
For regulatory EHS compliance, here are two key steps to stay proactive and minimize the risks of non-compliance:
Eliminating complexity from your compliance programs is critical. Why are your people still utilizing spreadsheets and email chains to manage compliance? The simple answer is probably because they haven’t been empowered to find a better way to do their work.
Regulatory EHS compliance solutions are designed to support proactive environmental compliance management by centralizing and standardizing processes and automating key aspects, such as notifications and reporting. These technologies are a great place to begin your digital transformation journey.
Compliance management is the foundation of environmental compliance. It should be a central aspect of your company’s improvement initiatives.
All of this reduces the risk of future non-compliance events that could result in injuries or fatalities to employees, a public health emergency, or an environmental disaster. A single event could cost your company and shareholders millions of dollars in regulatory penalties, legal settlements with injured parties, or expensive site cleanups.
Modernizing the way environmental compliance obligations are tracked and managed across your environmental teams has transformative value for everyone involved.
At the same time, regional, business unit and corporate personnel, subject matter experts, managers, and executives are provided better visibility into what’s happening across all their facilities, enabling them to better proactively respond to issues, questions, and various deadlines as they arise rather than always being reactive and putting out fires.
By making environmental compliance management simple and visible, this eliminates chaos and enables your environmental teams to be proactive rather than reactive.
The ability to automate regulatory updates and notifications is invaluable to keeping facilities in compliance on an ongoing basis. This is a central step in the Guided Environmental Compliance method from Encamp, as is the ability to build a sound foundation and transform your environmental compliance program into an auditable and continuous process. By blending digitization, high-tech solutions and the high-touch support of Encamp’s compliance experts in a technology-driven system, Guided Environmental Compliance is yet another means by which to mitigate the many risks of non-compliance.
Encamp is on a mission to create a world where good for business can equal good for the environment. We help enterprises transform compliance programs and human processes into a technology-driven system that lays the foundation for accurate and ongoing environmental compliance through a blended method of intelligent high-tech solutions and high-touch expert support.
Tom is the Senior Content Writer at Encamp. And like all other Encampers, he’s in tune with the environment and what happens to it. He’s been writing about creative technology solutions for longer than he cares to admit.
