By Phil Molé, MPH
Are you interested in Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) software? You’ve come to the right place! Investing in EHS software delivers significant capabilities and benefits that enhance compliance, safety, and operational efficiency.
Here are the top five reasons to consider implementing EHS software at your organization.
1. EHS Software Can Help Improve Regulatory Compliance
There are many EHS regulations out there, and the regulatory landscape is always evolving. Regulations like the OSHA HazCom Standard are widely applicable, and OSHA issued a 2024 final rule to update the Standard via a phased-in compliance timeline, so even companies in the chemical supply chain who already had a handle on HazCom will now have more work to do. There are also global regulations like Canada’s Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS), the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Australia’s Work Health and Safety (WHS) model regulations and many others. If your company operates globally, compliance is even more complex.
EHS software centralizes and automates compliance tracking, ensuring adherence to standards such as OSHA and EPA regulations. This reduces the risk of fines and legal issues by keeping organizations updated on regulatory requirements.
2. Improved Workplace Safety & Incident Prevention
Many EHS professionals (perhaps including yourself) struggle through no fault of their own to tackle their safety to-do list. There are incident investigations to start, completed investigations to follow up on, inspections to conduct, and safety meetings to schedule and manage. The job is often harder and more time consuming than it needs to be because there isn’t enough support – for example, you might still be using hard copy forms for inspections, and even if you’re using technologies to support various EHS tasks, you may have different tools for doing different things with little or no communication between them.
All of this is frustrating, but it also puts your employees at risk because time spent laboring through inefficient manual tasks is time that you can’t spend addressing hazards and improving workplace safety. There’s no separating efficiency from effectiveness in EHS management. Addressing risks quickly is literally a matter of life and death.
EHS software helps by:
- Simplifying completion of your most important tasks, like incident investigations, inspections, safety meetings and management of your safety data sheet (SDS) library
- Providing clear insights into patterns of risks and injuries, so you can focus efforts where they’re most needed
- Facilitating many types of risk assessments, including hazard identifications (HAZIDs), job safety analyses (JSAs), hazard and operability studies (HAZOPs), process hazard analyses (PHAs) and more, and making it easier to access and understand information from the assessments
- Enabling high quality ergonomics assessments using 3-D motion capture technology, with the expertise of real certified professional ergonomists (CPEs) baked into the software to help you better identify root causes and select appropriate controls. The best ergonomics software also helps you and your team quickly build knowledge with interactive, online modules covering everything from principles of ergonomics to ergonomic design guidelines.
3. EHS Software Streamlines Data Management & Reporting
It’s not enough just to shorten your to-do list, because you also need to be able to access your EHS records and data to be able to confirm that you’ve completed your tasks and to be able to gain actionable insights about EHS performance. Good data drives good decision making, but the challenge is to be able to view your EHS data clearly and concisely so you can make those decisions with speed and confidence, but that gets harder to do as the volume and complexity of data increases.
EHS software centralizes your data and dramatically simplifies analysis and reporting. It empowers EHS professionals with real-time insights into safety incidents and other important EHS metrics, facilitates compliance reporting, and generates key performance indicators (KPIs) to more clearly and easily track EHS performance trends.
4. Cost Savings & Operational Efficiency
Addressing risks quickly and effectively is critical to the well-being of your workforce, as well as your own because let’s face it, the life of an EHS professional comes with its share of sleepless nights. When your foremost concern is getting all of your people home safely at the end of every workday, the stakes are high.
A lesser but still significant concern is that bad safety performance also costs your company money. For example, injuries and occupational illnesses have direct and indirect costs, and those can be substantial. There are also less obvious costs, including:
- Lost productivity due to downtime from injuries and psychosocial risks such as anxiety due to employees being worried about injuries
- Recruitment/onboarding/training costs to replace employees who leave your company following a significant injury, or due to dissatisfaction with safety management
- Fines due to non-compliance with EHS regulations and potential civil financial liability
- Loss of business and value chain partners (e.g., transporters, retailers, distributors) due to negative publicity over workplace accidents
There’s a direct link between safety risks and financial risks, but fortunately there’s also substantial opportunity for return on investment (ROI) when EHS professionals are proactive in addressing those risks. Choosing and implementing the right EHS software can lead to significant cost savings by helping you identify and control workplace risks. Along the way, you’ll reduce expenses related to employee compensation, recruitment, and illness, and boost operational efficiency by automating processes and reducing manual administrative tasks.
5. Improved Employee Engagement with Your Safety Program
You can have the most beautifully written EHS policies in the world and have the best intentions behind them, but they will fail without employee engagement. Why is that? One reason is that you simply can’t do it all yourself. You’ve probably already realized this truth, and maybe that’s why you’re here looking for information about EHS software. Being able to share responsibility for key safety tasks is a surefire way to get that to-do list shorter. Another reason related to that is that employees need to believe in, or “buy into” your safety program, or they won’t want to participate in your program. If you don’t have good employee buy-in, you ‘re at risk of increased injuries, increased numbers of violations and fines, poor data, and higher overall costs.
This is a big reason why international safety management standards like ISO 45001 emphasize the importance of employee engagement (or what the standard, more technically, calls “consultation and participation”) in a successful safety management system. In fact, ISO 45001 specifically stresses the importance of involving frontline workers in safety, not just EHS managers, executives and consultants, as has often been the case.
The problem is that many companies would like to more significantly involve frontline workers in safety management, but don’t have effective ways to do so. That’s where EHS software comes in.
Here are some of the ways that the right EHS software can improve employee engagement:
- Providing easy mobile capabilities to share responsibility for completing key tasks such as reporting incidents and hazards, conducting risk assessments, and conducting inspections.
- Baked-in expertise combined with AI and machine learning technologies provide better insights into safety data that you and your team can use to make meaningful improvements
- Built-in notifications to alert employees when they’ve been assigned a task, with notifications for tasks that are approaching or passing their deadlines, helping to drive ownership and accountability for safety performance
- Access to built-in guides and user training facilitate implementation and adoption
- Simplified access to safety program data to foster better transparency and buy-in
Ready to Learn More About the VelocityEHS Accelerate ® Platform?
Now that you’ve learned the most important reasons to buy EHS software, you’re ready to learn about the best EHS software.
We built the VelocityEHS Accelerate ® Platform for the real heroes, the EHS professionals like you, to give you the tools you need to help keep your workers safe. Accelerate ® gives you best-in class chemical management, safety, industrial ergonomics, and operational risk management software, all on one platform that delivers an integrated user experience that’s accessible from anywhere via mobile devices.
Join the largest global software community of EHS experts and thought leaders, and see how easy EHS management can be when you’re backed by a team that is committed to your success. Request a demo today to see the Accelerate ® Platform in action!