A major challenge for organizations is generating and reporting on all of the items of data necessary today to maintain regulatory compliance. Traditional manual, non-systematized methods are insufficient to meet these challenges. Furthermore, the same data can be put to use to examine trends, production rates, material consumption, …in short, the data can be employed to look at operating conditions, providing insight into opportunities to improve those operations, and supporting the long-term sustainability of an enterprise.
Many organizations have begun the exercise of systematizing and mechanizing the collection, manipulation, and ultimate use of data only to find, at the end of a long and costly process, that the product that was created or delivered fell well short of their expectations.
This paper will examine critical aspects of scoping and selecting the best approach for an enterprise in EMIS (Environmental Management Information System) application. It will address how to begin the information gathering to establish internal work, task management, and process flow, how to work with outside resources to refine expectations, the pro's and con's of the “build it or buy it” decision, and the elements necessary to consider when establishing a ROI expectation.
A properly selected and maintained EMIS system can not only assist a company in achieving and maintaining an enviable environmental compliance record, but it can also utilize data gathered to this end to improve the production efficiency of operating components of a facility, such as paint booths.