Locus Introduces Augmented Reality to Integrated Portal for Environmental, Energy, Water, Resource, and Emissions Management
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 6 December 2010 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced today new and expanded features and functionalities of ePortal, its award winning software platform for environmental and energy information management. This fifth generation version of the platform introduces a new Rich Internet Application (RIA)-based user interface that provides enhanced usability, improved work flows, and Augmented Reality (AR).
ePortal now provides customers with a single integrated portal platform to capture, organize, visualize, and report all key facility environmental information in a central, enterprise database offered in the cloud. The platform enables simplified work flows and advanced visualization that includes AR to create individualized views of information across media and resources. With the use of the ePortal software clients can manage all aspects of their regulatory compliance, energy and water usage, water quality, air emissions, GHG reporting, health and safety and much more. In short, ePortal provides the most advanced approach to the complex EERP challenges that face many companies today.
Locus’ ePortal is built around the familiar Conceptual Site Model (CSM). By design, CSM is multidisciplinary and encompasses both legacy and ongoing information about a site or facility. It can be viewed as a cube drawn around a site, part of which is underground and part above ground. All relevant inputs to and outputs from the cube are monitored and recorded. On the input side, utilities such as electricity, gas, and water, and raw materials are tracked. Outputs include air, water, and soil discharges and waste. Equipment within the cube such as boilers, stacks, tanks, and so forth become assets that have various attributes that must be recorded, stored, and often reported on.
For companies that adopt ePortal, it becomes the enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard for managing the many aspects of the sustainable enterprise. It synthesizes and crystallizes what is already known about a site or facility and augments that information with ongoing monitoring and reporting. Companies are able to report and forecast the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in real time across multiple hierarchical views. ePortal brings Augmented Reality to CSM.
Using Locus’ CSM-based approach, clients can take a more holistic view of their enterprise, enabling them to reduce both their compliance expenditures and their operational costs. In particular, ePortal provides enterprise tools to reduce and optimize consumption of various resources to lower GHG emissions and encourage more sustainable growth. Simplification of facility management based on a CSM approach recognizes that businesses need a flexible, easy to understand, multi-media solution in today’s multi-regulatory world. Locus’ CSM-based environmental portal provides the tools to quantify environmental liabilities, manage sustainability and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, report water footprint, organize compliance and Health and Safety (H&S) records, accurately report to regulators, and run what-if analysis to facilitate forecasting.
“The increased sophistication of the corporate customer, combined with the recent challenging economic climate has fueled the need for easy to use integrated solutions that allow fewer people to manage more using less. That was the driving force behind ePortal’s recent update, which provides a single software solution, across the various regulated media. Historically, many companies have built silo applications that deal with one or a few reporting requirements and associated data management needs. In fact, some companies have been building software solutions in this space for over a decade. But what has been lacking in the market space is an integrated solution that brings many if not all environmental, energy, water and other compliance and consumption requirements under a single portal infrastructure and Single Sign On (SSO) on the web. What industry wants and needs is an integrated system similar to ERP that would manage all their environmental, energy, water, and other sustainability needs. That is exactly what we have built and are happy to offer it to our clients,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.
