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San Jose Water Expands Locus Technologies SaaS to include GIS+

Locus GIS+ will streamline SJW’s water quality and environmental management from watershed to consumer taps.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 14 February 2023 — Locus Technologies, the leading EHS Compliance, and ESG software provider, today announced that San Jose Water (SJW), an investor-owned public utility providing water service to a population of approximately one million people in the Santa Clara Valley, has expanded Locus’ environmental information management software to use Locus GIS+ for advanced GIS analysis.

SJW has been using Locus SaaS and mobile app since 2014 to manage its field data collection, water quality compliance, and regulatory reporting. SJW also uses Locus to track sewer discharges and well blow-offs.

“Our responsibility is to ensure our customers receive the highest quality drinking water from their taps. We monitor the quality and cleanliness of our water in terms of state and federal regulatory requirements. In 2021, our highly experienced staff collected more than 1,000 regulatory and non-regulatory samples from our distribution system and treatment plant, generating over 23,000 data points. To manage this data effectively, we used Locus’ cloud-based software. GIS mapping capabilities are essential for our environmental data analysis. Locus GIS+ will allow quick data visualization and is a quantum leap forward with advanced analysis tools that use Esri’s Smart Mapping technology,” said Suzanne DeLorenzo, the Director of Water Quality at San Jose Water.

“Locus’s mission is to help organizations, such as San Jose Water, to achieve their business goals by providing them the software tools to manage key data associated with water quality and compliance reporting,” said Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus. “With GIS+, SJW will have all the tools they need to perform a wide range of geospatial data analysis across their distribution system. Our water quality management cloud-based software, coupled with GIS+ and Locus Mobile for field data collection, provides our customers with a highly scalable and feature-rich application that gives water utilities strong analytical power and advanced GIS capabilities.”

Locus GIS+ is powered by Esri’s ArcGIS platform and offers various advanced features— including enhanced cartography, comprehensive spatial data analysis, and the ability to use the customer’s map data through integration with ArcGIS Online and Portal for ArcGIS.

ABOUT SAN JOSE WATER
Founded in 1866, San Jose Water is an investor-owned public utility and is one of the largest and most technically sophisticated urban water systems in the United States. Serving over one million people in the greater San Jose metropolitan area, San Jose Water also provides services to other utilities, including operations and maintenance, billing, and backflow testing. San Jose Water is owned by SJW Group, a publicly-traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol SJW. SJW Group also owns Connecticut Water Company in Connecticut; Maine Water Company in Maine; and SJWTX, Inc. (dba Canyon Lake Water Service Company) in Texas. To learn more about San Jose Water, visit www.sjwater.com.

The Expertise Behind the Software

When choosing Locus, you can be confident that your EHS software is built and supported by the experts. Our team holds degrees and certifications in environmental engineering, mathematics, computer science, and beyond. We understand the challenges of EHS compliance and build our solutions with those in mind. Have Questions? Contact us to learn more.

Simplify Your Water Tracking with Locus Platform

Tracking your data is made easy within our software as a service (SaaS), Locus Platform (LP). Your company can take advantage of LP’s mobile-aware browser functions, giving you the capability to do all your fieldwork with your existing phones or tablets. When cellular connections are unavailable or unreliable, Locus also has a Mobile app which supports the offline capabilities you need to keep your workflow going.

Regardless of your mobile approach, each mobile form can be easily configured to capture the data you require in the field such as photos and the sampling results.

Along with easy mobile data collection, Locus Platform can help you to:

Track and report your daily results, such as chlorine, nitrite and temperature to water treatment operators, for real time adjustments.
Monitor lab results from routine sampling.
Flag out of range data in real time for notifications or data entry corrections.
Analyze data geospatially to understand situations impacting water quality.
Report average monthly chlorine results.
Track water quality complaints and illicit discharges overtime.
Generate Nitrification Reports.
Prepare Monthly Flushing reports.

Of course, those are not the limits of Locus Platform. Our software can also help you to:

Track and manage all types of tasks and regulatory commitments.
Track any type of permit and associated requirements.
Generate notifications for defined events, such as data entered above limits.
Produce PDF and Excel reports for regulators and customers.
Keep all your information in an easy-to-use secure system and basically future proof your program.

Whether in the office, or out in the field, Locus Technologies is with you every step of the way during the tracking process. Contact us to find your solution.

Request a demo

Send us your contact information and a Locus representative will be in touch to discuss your organization’s needs and provide an estimate, or set up a free demo of our enterprise environmental software solutions.

Shed Light On Your Air and GHG Calculations

Locus’ Air Quality app is designed to integrate with data sources to seamlessly calculate air emissions monthly or annually.

Locus Innovations in 2022

2022 has given us a wealth of new features and growth! Both of our platforms have undergone improvements to enhance our client’s user experience. Let’s look at all the new features for 2022.

Environmental Information Management (EIM)

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1. New Site Metrics dashboard allows immediate visibility into your data with clickable mapping. This is especially powerful for customers with multiple sites where they want to keep track of site activity and usage. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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2. Finding data can sometimes be overwhelming especially when you have hundreds, if not thousands, of locations and numerous analytical parameters to review. Locus added advanced database search tools to support multiple search terms and ‘exact match’ searches, making it easy to find exactly what you want with a couple of key words and a click. Never has finding the right results from large complex datasets been so easy. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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3. Locus has enhanced its API functionality to enable easier integration with external BI tools, including Tableau, PowerBI, and other apps. Now, customers that rely on external business analytical tools will have quick and easy access to data to combine with other internal data sources. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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4. Locus document management has been taken to the next level by allowing customers to link documents from any external library directly into their sites, monitoring locations, samples, and more. This means with a simple click, users can go to lab reports, regulatory reports, and any other current or historical document associated with the site. If you are using SharePoint, for example, to manage documents – they can be accessed directly from Locus software. Document access and security will be preserved by existing document library access controls. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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5. 2022 was the year of “help”. In addition to the advanced search, Locus added a new Help Browser to provide access to comprehensive documentation for every feature of the software. It is similar to the familiar “site map”, only the links take you to help content. With this new feature, users can view help in a single location vs having to access the information on each individual screen. For new users, or infrequent users, this will be their new favorite feature. [/sc_icon_with_text]

EHS & ESG Solutions

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1. Locus’ Survey/Questionnaire tool enables you to securely & easily obtain data globally without the burdens of training or maintaining user lists. The survey system effortlessly supports data entry from external organizations (such as suppliers) or even occasional users internal to your organization, with a simple link click. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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2. Locus released a new pivot table tool that enables you to perform full data analysis on any query in the system. Data may be grouped and organized by any value. Output options include bar charts, heatmaps, tables, area charts, scatter charts, and tree maps. In support of the output options, Locus has improved the ability for users to create dashboards more easily. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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3. Complex inspection and audit forms require branching, sophisticated, scoring, and automated responses. Locus added new question types to its inspection/ audit module, including conditional questions based on responses to one or more previous questions. Locus augmented the scoring calculation mechanism and automated creation and tracking of corrective action. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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4. In today’s world, users need access to environmental data on the go. Locus augmented its mobile offerings to include configurable layouts for mobile users, with compact forms specially designed for smartphone and tablet access. [/sc_icon_with_text]

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5. Today’s managers want immediate access to the data they need. Locus’ new Landing Page feature makes it simple to configure the dashboards, bookmarks, and record lists. This enables the user to review just the areas they need to see and navigate efficiently to complete the work. [/sc_icon_with_text]

Contact us to see a demo of Locus software and get a quote

The Port of Seattle selects Locus Technologies for Permit Compliance Tracking Software

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 29 November 2022 — Locus Technologies (Locus) is pleased to announce that The Port of Seattle (Port) has selected Locus’ multitenant Software as a Service (SaaS) for its Environmental Permit Compliance Tracking software. The Port of Seattle is a government agency overseeing the seaport and airport of Seattle. Their portfolio ranges from parks and waterfront real estate to one of the largest airports and container terminals on the West Coast. With Locus’ software, the Port of Seattle’s Maritime Environment & Sustainability department will track and manage compliance with their many permits associated with ongoing Maritime operations. This win represents additional work under Locus’ existing 10-year contract with the Port.

Locus’ SaaS will replace existing systems, which no longer meet the Port’s requirements. The Port will use Locus’ configurable compliance features to track, notify, and manage thousands of regulatory commitments for the Port and its facilities. Locus software provides a unified system for environmental data management and compliance and allows the flexibility to adapt to regulatory changes over the course of the contract.

“We are very pleased that Port of Seattle after selecting Locus earlier this year, recognized the power and flexibility of Locus and extended the use of Locus to include Permit Compliance. The Port selected Locus software because it meets a wide set of robust permit tracking and notification requirements for their active Maritime operations. The Port will streamline tracking of environmental compliance obligations using Locus’ SaaS with a configuration suited to their business processes,” said Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus.

Getting More from your Environmental Data using Dashboards with Integrated Mapping

Today is GIS Day, a day started in 1999 to showcase the many uses of geographical information systems (GIS). Earlier Locus blog posts have explained how GIS and maps support visualization of objects in space and over time. This post covers a specific visualization method called data dashboards.

A data dashboard is a combination of charts, maps, text, and images that enables analysis of data and thereby promotes discovery of previously unknown relationships in the data. Companies and organizations use dashboards to develop insight into the overall status of a company or of a company division, process, or product line. Dashboards are also a common function in ‘business intelligence’ applications such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. A printed dashboard is static, but an online dashboard can be dynamic; in a dynamic dashboard, interacting with one item on the dashboard causes the other items to update. Taken together, the visualizations on a dynamic dashboard can help you find the story in your data.

One reason dashboards are so helpful is that they allow humans to partially ‘offload’ their thinking. Cognitive research has shown that human ‘working memory’ handles at most four items at a time. A good visualization, however, reduces the number of items to process in memory.

Consider a large table of carbon dioxide emissions by country for multiple years; it can be difficult to keep all the numbers in mind if you are trying to find trends.

If you plot the data in a graph, however, each series of data in the chart becomes just one line on the graph. It is much easier to compare lines on the chart than to compare columns of numbers.

Now consider making a map with countries color coded by emissions. Again, for each country, the map reduces multiple numbers to a single color for that country on the map. You can compare country colors more easily than columns of numbers.

A dashboard that combines multiple visualizations further enhances data analysis. Imagine a dynamic dashboard showing you both the emissions chart and map described above. If you select a country on the map, the chart can highlight the line for that country, so you compare its emissions to other countries over time. Similarly, if you select a line on the chart for a specific country, the map can highlight the selected country to show how its emissions compare to nearby countries. This interactivity lets you drill into your data more effectively than using either the chart or the map by itself.

Here are three examples of effective dashboards that are available online:

The Covid-19 dashboard from John Hopkins shows a map, charts, and tables of Covid -19 cases.
The Global Climate Dashboard from NOAA shows charts of multiple climate indicators.
The Carbon Pricing dashboard from the World Bank lets you drilldown to see carbon pricing initiatives for various nations.

Locus includes data dashboards in our applications. One example is the Site Metrics dashboard in EIM, Locus’s cloud-based, software-as-a-service application for environmental data management. The Site Metrics dashboard lets you perform roll-up queries across your portfolio of sites. A map on the dashboard shows all states with active sites. If you select one or more states, the dashboard updates the charts and tables on the right to show total sites, user logins, and record counts. Other dashboards can support showing sample locations of certain chemicals or counts of regulatory limit exceedances.

A further example comes from the Locus Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) application. ESG metrics are becoming increasingly important measures for an organization’s performance. Data dashboards can help companies quickly visualize trends in their ESG metrics using intuitive mapping tools.

This dashboard illustrates both spatial and time trends and provides the raw data necessary for auditability and transparent decision making. Having these features on a single combined view provides users with instant access to the key inputs for ESG prioritization, planning, and project implementation.

As these examples from Locus show, data dashboards with integrated mapping are important tools for maximizing the value of your collected environmental and ESG data. For any dataset with a geographic component, it’s important to incorporate mapping elements in the outputs, to highlight trends and patterns that may not otherwise be visible in a chart or table. Modern software can combine these output formats in a way that tells the story shown by your data.

Interested in Locus’ GIS solutions?

Locus GIS+ features all of the functionality you love in EIM’s classic Google Maps GIS for environmental management—integrated with the powerful cartography, interoperability, & smart-mapping features of Esri’s ArcGIS platform!

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About the Author—Dr. Todd Pierce, Locus Technologies

Dr. Pierce manages a team of programmers tasked with development and implementation of Locus’ EIM application, which lets users manage their environmental data in the cloud using Software-as-a-Service technology. Dr. Pierce is also directly responsible for research and development of Locus’ GIS (geographic information systems) and visualization tools for mapping analytical and subsurface data. Dr. Pierce earned his GIS Professional (GISP) certification in 2010.

A More Robust EHS Software Solution

One of the most frequent conversations we have is with EHS professionals who approach us with struggles concerning their current software solution. They often seek out Locus out of frustration, because their current software provider focuses almost exclusively on the safety side of EHS. While there’s nothing innately wrong with focusing on one aspect of EHS, most professionals need a more robust software to meet their needs. They need a solution that can handle the environmental side of EHS.

When we ask what they’re missing, it ranges depending on their current software, and most commonly these professionals don’t have the ability to automate environmental data collection, management, and reporting. They are, for the most part, entering everything by hand and reporting to local, state, and federal agencies manually. The lack of a proper solution from their current provider means that they’re doing more work and potentially misreporting due to repeat entry errors.

EHS professionals Must focus on a wide range of issues, and a lack of versatility in their software solution means that they have to work harder to fill in the gap in their existing process and software solutions. When Locus is approached, most of the time it’s by professionals seeking relief, and they find us because we offer a tool that both meets their needs and makes their work less stressful.

The environmental side of EHS is vast, and professionals are expected handle anything from air and GHG emissions to water, waste and beyond. And while other providers offer anything from a bare bones solution to enough to get by, Locus knows that a robust solution can reduce the burden, time, and potential inaccuracies that EHS professionals face. We know because we’ve been there. Locus software is developed by and for EHS professionals. Our domain experts have had to deal with the struggles of subpar software, so that’s why we make a solution to fit the needs of our peers. That’s why our EHS software features a full suite of solutions, and a robust calculation engine.

Are you seeking to simplify your data management, reporting, and visualization with a modern EHS software solution? Reach out and speak with a domain expert today.

Locus at 25 Years: A Long-Term Vision for Environmental Stewardship

Over the longer term, we envision a world where we can use shared environmental data to take a more concerted approach to our collective environmental stewardship. We consider the work at Locus an essential step in addressing a monumental global problem.

The conversation about the environmental landscape has evolved drastically over the last 50 years as we continue to understand how human activity has affected the planet. The 21st century’s environmental challenges are manifold as shortages of drinkable water; the impact of various pollutants that enter our atmosphere, including greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater, radioactive materials, and other hazardous materials; the strains of our ever-increasing population on limited resources, and threatened ecosystems; and climate change causing extreme weather conditions to push more and more of the population into a precarious situation.

Companies and society need a collective and holistic understanding of the problems we face. The only way to understand the whole picture and act meaningfully on a global level is for all companies to understand the impact of their activities. It’s impossible to mitigate the risks and effects of those activities on the planet when we do not have the data to characterize the problem and see a complete picture of what we face.

This whole picture will require us to monitor an unprecedented quantity of data, and with this massive data explosion, Locus’s current efforts come into play. We are working to ensure that we are prepared for this ever-increasing data tsunami by laying the groundwork with the companies and government agencies Locus works with daily. They are already tracking increased data, analyzing their activities, finding ways to operate more efficiently, producing fewer emissions and less wastewater, and improving their environmental footprints. Locus would like to see the scale of those mitigation efforts increase a thousand-fold over the next ten years and for our efforts to yield clear improvements in our collective environmental impacts.

While someday we may have environmental data sharing among all public and private organizations, the regulatory bodies that govern them, and the scientific community, which will provide us with an even more complete picture of our environmental activities, any coordinated effort is years in the making. In the meantime, Locus ensures we are ready to help tackle the problem.

This is the final post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here.

Locus at 25 Years: Climate Change Software, A Generational Opportunity

For many, climate change management and carbon accounting present a new opportunity, a new domain to be conquered by software. The upside looks huge, next frontier, next bubble. But it is not that simple. Instead of a single part, there is a family of domains, each with its not that simple science interwoven with many unsynchronized reporting standards and sometimes competing regulations. There are no clear regulations or other drivers to normalize the playing field. Nevertheless, ESG reporting created a hype that looks more like the medieval battle for territory.

Locus software has dominated the EHS compliance space for the last two decades. Consequently, Locus has the best shot at the ESG software market as the company has been gradually pivoting into sustainability software for some time. Locus software already manages most enterprise customers’ data in their EHS apps necessary for ESG reporting. Most importantly, Locus has the domain expertise to build software applications to match the complexity of ESG reporting and carbon accounting. In other words, Locus understands the science behind data and has used this expertise to quickly build a science-based reporting infrastructure leveraging Locus’ already strong presence in the space.

Locus’s applications are based on science and backed by data primarily from the EHS compliance for companies that disclose their information based on verified scientific data and actual readings from their instruments, lab results, resource consumption, waste generation, or water and energy management.

One of the biggest drivers of ESG software will be the convergence of climate change, water, and energy crises in the coming years. This sustainability and EHS compliance elements must coexist in a highly scalable real-time software platform that only a modern, multitenant cloud architecture offers. Locus has it.

Locus ESG software offers a SaaS platform that incorporates unified data layers that give Locus customers a consolidated view of their data across different business silos, scopes, and integrated EHS and ESG platforms.

Locus’ unified data layer brings varying data sources together to offer a single view of a company’s climate-related data. Using Locus’s shared SaaS-based applications and platforms could also give investment managers tools to evaluate their investment strategies and up-to-date opinions on their portfolio performance on ESG elements.

At Locus, we are genuinely driven by the dynamic industries we serve and the changing environmental landscape we must all work to safeguard. We help solve our customers’ complex environmental problems, improve the way environmental professionals work, and offer new ways to organize vast amounts of environmental, sustainability, and energy data on the Web. We turn environmental and energy data into actionable, real-time information. Most importantly, we help our clients lower operating costs and reduce environmental risk exposure and liability.

This is the eighth post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here. This series concludes with Locus at 25 Years: A Long-Term Vision for Environmental Stewardship.