7 Must-Have Features for Every

Environmental Management System

www.softexpert.com
 Companies that aspire to be better Environmental, health and safety
environmental administrators invest
management is important for any
in strong environmental, health and
safety management, also known as company that is looking to:
EHSM. From an environmental
standpoint, this involves creating a
systematic approach to managing Achieve
waste, complying with Build a safer operational
culture excellence
environmental regulations, or
reducing the company’s carbon
footprint. Successful EHS programs
also include measures to address Reduce Ensure EHS
ergonomics, air quality, and other risks compliance
aspects of workplace safety that
could affect the health and comfort
of employees.

www.softexpert.com
 At a high level, EHS management encapsulates the use of
business processes and requirements that are designed
to achieve continuous improvement in EHS performance.
01
These processes reflect the role of EHS performance Risk
within the larger overall goals of sustainability management
02
performance and operational excellence, taking into Document
account the planning, processes, procedures, and
07 control
implementation of EHS initiatives. In turn, these directives Centralized
should be considered in an established methodology reporting
designed to achieve performance, evaluate results, and
03
provide mechanisms for acting on recommended actions. Performance
06 measurement
Flexible
compliance
Regardless of the volume of requirements from platform
04
local, national, and international regulators Incident
05 management
(e.g., OSHA, EPA, GRI, Health Canada, HSE, ISO Audit and
programs, etc.), an environmental, inspection
health and safety management
solution must contain these
7 critical resources:
www.softexpert.com
 01 | Risk management
In large and/or complex organizations, risks are everywhere. And if you’re the person
charged with controlling hazards, operational threats, or environmental concerns for
your company, it can be difficult even figuring out where to begin. To do this, you need
a system that integrates risk assessment into every step of the EHS process. Main
features include:
• Enterprise Risk Management tools to monitor risk trends across multiple
departments.
• Aspects & Impacts analysis to reduce environmental impacts.
• Job Safety Analysis (JSA) that assesses risk at each task step, as well as for the
job as a whole.
• Filtering of corrective and preventive actions by risk, ensuring requests are handled
by risk priority.
• Integration of multiple risk models, including risk matrices, decision trees and
qualitative/quantitative risk assessment.
A solution with these features gives you a systematic, objective way to assess risk
across the organization and a critical strategy for compliance given the faster pace
and increasing complexity of business.

www.softexpert.com
 02 | Document control
Paperwork is a huge headache in the EHS world and it is also a driving force behind
implementing an EHS management solution. But to actually get rid of that headache,
the solution must have robust document control capabilities.
Even in a paperless environment, multiple document versions still means lots of
digital paper movements, like searching through old server folders and emailing
colleagues to track down work procedures, job descriptions, product specifications
and test methods. Document control software keeps everything organized, creating a
revision-controlled environment that lets you:
• Link related documents.
• Create dedicated workflows for different document types.
• Track revisions, approvals and electronic signatures.
• Find the most updated version of documents.
• Automatically distribute documents.

www.softexpert.com
 03 | Performance measurement
If you are tasked with collecting and reporting on a range of metrics such as water
and energy use, waste generation, and air emissions for one facility, this is a difficult
yet feasible task. However, when you have to collect information from multiple
facilities, in a variety of countries, the level of difficulty multiplies exponentially.
The pain of maintaining performance metrics with a manual system or a system that
is not automated to adjust for differences in data sources is real. It costs you time,
you lose accuracy, and you often have no time left for strategic analysis.
An EHS management solution must collect the most important KPIs for your
business, including key indicators and deep data for environment and safety, energy
use, emissions, resource usage, and more. Whether for one facility or every facility in
your global enterprise, the solution must give you the power and flexibility to define,
assign, and convert any input into the outputs upon which you report and by which
your organization measures its success.
Once deployed, you should be able to manage your company’s impacts, set
performance targets, decrease costs associated with resource usage and, most
importantly, demonstrate your company’s commitment to improving environmental
impacts and performance.

www.softexpert.com
 04 | Incident management
Companies expect their EHS functions to move beyond compliance and safety,
aligning with industry best practices, effectively managing organizational risk, driving
operational efficiency, leading sustainability initiatives, and contributing to the bottom
line. Failure in any of these areas can have serious and long-term consequences for
the health of employees and the business and could result in injuries or fatalities, lost
production and revenues, negative effects and adverse impacts to your company’s
image.
Incident management is the heart of an EHS management system. An EHS
management solution lets operations-level users easily and seamlessly report on
incidents and near-misses, and conduct comprehensive safety risk assessments and
reviews. Main features include:
• Streamlined, automated management of work-related, environmental and property
incidents.
• Recording and tracking of incidents.
• Corrective actions planning and execution.
• Root cause analysis enabled by embedded analytics tools.

www.softexpert.com
 05 | Audit and inspection
Managing an effective audit program, routine inspection process or behavior-based
safety observation initiative may be high on your list of goals, but these all require a
lot of one of your most precious resources – time. Audits and inspections are key
drivers of EHS excellence for those companies committed to meeting or exceeding
industry best practices and achieving operational efficiencies.
When it comes to audits and inspections, an EHS management solution must make it
easy for you to create and maintain unlimited checklists and protocols to evaluate
every aspect of your EHS compliance, and distribute them across your entire
enterprise. It must also make it easy for you to see what is being done, what needs
doing, and who should be doing it. Some core capabilities include:
• Compliance audits.
• Self Assessments.
• Routine inspections.
• Management system audits.

www.softexpert.com
 06 | Flexible compliance platform
How many regulations govern the activities at just one of your facilities? How about across
your entire enterprise? Managing your organization’s regulatory and corporate responsibilities
is considered by some to be the most important element of an EHS management program. It is
also one of the most challenging. The number and variety of compliance obligations, combined
with the constantly changing regulatory landscape, can make the job complicated and
stressful.
Without a centralized, automated solution for managing hazards, incidents, and inspections, it
can be a struggle to pull together the data necessary to monitor trends and gain a true picture
of risk across the organization. A successful compliance management program requires a
holistic, connected approach that engages stakeholders throughout the organization to ensure
regulatory compliance is being managed and achieved at all levels.
An EHS management solution must be designed with a flexible framework, built from OSHA,
GRI, CDP, ISO and other processes, providing a foundation for flexible configuration to meet
your unique needs. This means that you can start with the best practices from these regulatory
frameworks and configure the solution – the workflows, forms, fields, keywords and even the
layout – to meet your specific need. All this, without any need for extensive programming or
customization. User-friendly solutions let you:
• Build and modify your own workflows, forms and reports.
• Access templates based on industry best practices.
• Make customizations without programming and instead using familiar tools like drag-and-
drop configuration.
• Configure and track compliance tasks, deadlines, permit limits and due dates.

www.softexpert.com
 07 | Centralized reporting
One of the real rewards of deploying an EHS solution is supposed to be the ability to
see what is happening in your organization. To take that data and use it to make
strategic decisions that help you reduce risk, lower costs, and improve environment,
health, safety and sustainability throughout your organization.
With so much data being collected, it’s important for businesses to be able to
leverage this data to gain insight into company processes. That is why advanced
reporting and dashboard capabilities are such a crucial component of the EHS
management system. Key functions include:
• On-demand reports and dashboards that can be used out-of-the-box or
customized to your needs.
• Focus on information that is actionable.
• Easy to drill deeper into information to see the underlying framework.
• Data availability as an output in different formats, like charts, lists, heat maps, etc.
These features make reporting much simpler, giving you the ability to create
corporate-level reports in the short term while promoting organization-wide
collaboration.

www.softexpert.com
 Now that you already know the 7 must-have Features for every EHS management system, find out more about
the most complete and innovative solution on the market for process automation and improvement, regulatory
compliance and EHS excellence.

SoftExpert EHSM
Reduce risks. Track compliance. Achieve operational excellence.
SoftExpert EHSM (Environmental, Health and Safety Management) is a robust web-based
software that facilitates the complete and closed-loop management of the EHS program,
drastically reducing the risk of health and safety incidents and strengthening compliance with
environmental regulations and labor laws.

www.softexpert.com
 Risk management

Find out more

Document control

Find out more

www.softexpert.com
 Performance
measurement

Find out more

Incident management

Find out more

www.softexpert.com
 Audit and inspection

Find out more

Flexible compliance
platform

Find out more

www.softexpert.com
 Centralized reporting

Find out more

www.softexpert.com
 Take your business to the next level

www.softexpert.com | [email protected]

Disclaimer: The content of this publication may not, in whole or in part, be copied or reproduced without prior authorization from SoftExpert Software. This publication is provided by SoftExpert and/or its network of affiliates strictly for informational purposes, without any guarantee
of any kind. The only guarantees related to SoftExpert products and services are those contained within a contract. Some product functionalities and characteristics presented herein may be optional or may depend on the makeup of the offer(s) acquired. The content of this material
is subject to change without prior notice.