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Locus Technologies Receives 16th Consecutive EBJ Award for Information Technology in ESG

Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) recognized Locus for ESG software growth and innovation.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 24 February 2022 — Locus Technologies, the leading EHS Compliance and ESG software provider, was awarded a 16th consecutive award from Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) for growth and innovation in the field of Information Technology in the environmental software with particular focus on ESG.

EBJ is a business research publication providing strategic business intelligence to the environmental industry. Locus received the 2021 EBJ Award for Information Technology by growing and innovating its unified EHS compliance and ESG software platform.

In 2021 Locus took a leading market position in the fast-growing space of ESG software. Locus’s ESG SaaS covers carbon data aggregation via a powerful visual calculation engine, investor-grade emissions calculations audit capabilities, reporting to multiple standards from a single data set, integration APIs, dashboards, and carbon reduction goal setting and tracking. This separates Locus from competitors as customers demand integrated net-zero ESG software that supports investor-grade data in disclosure rules such as the EU’s corporate sustainability reporting directive, mandatory TCFD reporting, and anticipated SEC action on climate disclosures.

In 2021 Locus continued to expand its ESG SaaS to include built-in business intelligence tools allowing for interactive, actionable insights into EHS and ESG data, forecasting tools to predict future ESG reporting, APIs linking to utility meters, and interfaces with other Locus and third-party systems that house ESG data. Locus’s ESG application is focused on “enter once, report many times.” The gold standard for multinational enterprises with many locations worldwide is to have a system configured to report to multiple organizations and many standards from a single dataset. Essential built-in reporting in the Locus ESG app includes state or federal regulations, internal CSR, and ESG based on whatever standard their organization adheres to, such as CDP, GRI, SASB, TCDF, or more recent World Economic Forum (WEF) attempt to standardize many voluntary standards.

Locus also expanded its ESG consulting expertise by becoming the first and only software provider to offer accreditation services under new Oregon DEQ guidelines requiring third-party verification for GHG and CFP programs.

Besides strong growth in ESG space, Locus also continues to lead the software for water quality management market with the addition of new SaaS customers in 2021, such as the City of Hillsboro, Oregon for water quality management and Westinghouse Electric Company for control of environmental and radionuclides data, cementing Locus’s market leader position in the space of nuclear facilities.

“Locus’s investment in integrated carbon management software and EHS compliance is paying off. As one of the early SaaS leaders in net-zero digital solutions for ESG reporting, Locus continues to provide value to companies that want to be credible with their carbon reporting and sustainability software.,” said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI), publisher of Environmental Business Journal.

“We would like to thank EBJ for recognizing Locus for a 16th consecutive year and for taking note of our industry-leading ESG software. We aim to continue expanding our software offerings to customers in 2022,” said Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus Technologies.

5 Major Signs That You Need to Replace Your Water Data Management Software

In providing water quality data management software to organizations serving millions of customers a day, our experts have found some common red flags in alternative solutions. Many alternatives to Locus are more prohibitive than helpful, leading to more issues than they should. Your organization deserves to reduce the stress of data entry, regulatory and voluntary reporting, and more. Here are the top 5 signs that your organization is using outdated water quality software:

1. You’re transcribing data more than once or still using paper forms.

In order to ensure the highest level of data quality, you should not be risking human error at multiple levels. Enter your data once, and have it audit-ready, set to go on regulatory and voluntary reports, which are created directly from Locus Software.

2. Product support is not helmed by specialists who support you adequately after implementation.

Support doesn’t end after implementation. What we often hear from our customers when they switch from other providers is that they are delighted with the level of support that Locus brings with our software. Locus is proud to have the expertise and experience to back our software, and if there is anything you need, you can be sure that Locus support can get it done smoothly.

3. Your software has regular or unexpected downtimes.

You need reliability. Your software should be available to you on-demand. Locus is proud to be the only environmental software developer to publicly share our uptime, which is over 99.9%. If you are experiencing downtimes at inconvenient times or for long periods, you should switch.

4. It’s not mobile-enabled.

Field collection is key for most organizations managing water quality data. You should be able to enter that data into your system once, and from anywhere, reducing errors and extra time doing the same work twice (or more!). Also, being able to access historical data at your fingertips can help you solve problems on the fly.

5. It doesn’t provide actionable insights.

Sure, you may have all of your data collected, but what are you doing with it? If your software is not giving you meaningful findings from analyzing your data, then you are always going to be playing catch-up. Having the tools to help your organization look forward is essential in selecting water data management software.

Want to learn more about our Water Data Management Solution? Reach out to our product specialists today!

The Locus Technologies ESG Survey Tool

The Locus Technologies ESG Survey Tool enables users to email surveys and questionnaires directly from Locus to their supply chain. This is achieved without having to create usernames and credentials those receiving surveys.

When surveys are issued, the tool generates a secure link to each email recipient. Email recipients click the link, respond to the survey or questionnaire (without having to create a Locus username/password), and the data will be captured within Locus software for ESG purposes. Recipients of the link only receive access to their survey form, and nothing else in the system, and the links expire within a prescribed timeframe to further strengthen security.

The survey tool securely streamlines data collection from external entities who would traditionally never be given access to the system, including suppliers, vendors, sales channels and consultants. Once collected, the data can be immediately be used for ESG calculations and reporting.

Want to learn more about the Locus ESG Survey Tool? Reach out to our product specialists today!

ESG: Why Uptime of SaaS Vendors Matters

In a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, service uptime is vital for several reasons. Besides the obvious of having access to the service over the internet at any given time and staying connected to it 24/7/365, there are additional reasons why service uptime is essential. One of them is quickly verifying the vendor’s software architecture and how it fits the web.

Locus is committed to achieving and maintaining the trust of our customers. Integral to this mission is providing a robust compliance program that carefully considers data protection matters across our cloud services and service uptime. After security, service uptime and multitenancy at Locus come as a standard and, for the last 25 years, have been the three most essential pillars for delivering our cloud software. Our real-time status monitoring (ran by an independent provider of web monitoring services) provides transparency around service availability and performance for Locus’ ESG and EHS compliance SaaS products. Earlier I discussed the importance of multitenancy in detail. In this article, I will cover the importance of service uptime as one measure to determine if the software vendor is running genuine multitenant software or not.

Service Uptime

If your software vendor cannot share uptime statistics across all customers in real-time, they most likely do not run on a multitenant SaaS platform. One of the benefits of SaaS multitenancy (that is frequently overlooked during the customer software selection process) is that all customers are on the same instance and version of the software at all times. For that reason, there is no versioning of software applications. Did you ever see a version number for Google’s or Amazon’s software? Yet they serve millions of users simultaneously and constantly get upgraded. This is because multitenant software typically provides a rolling upgrade program: incremental and continuous improvements. It is an entirely new architectural approach to software delivery and maintenance model that frees customers from the tyranny of frequent and costly upgrades and upsell from greedy vendors. Companies have to develop applications from the ground up for multitenancy, and the good thing is that they cannot fake it. Let’s take a deeper dive into multitenancy.

An actual multitenant software provider can publish its software uptime across all customers in real-time. Locus, for example, has been publishing its service uptime in real-time across all customers since 2009. Locus’s track record speaks for itself: Locus Platform and EIM have a proven 99.9+ percent uptime record for years. To ensure maximum uptime and continuous availability, Locus provides redundant data protection and the most advanced facilities protection available, along with a complete data recovery plan. This is not possible with single-tenant applications as each customer has its software instance and probably a different version. One or a few customers may be down, others up, but one cannot generally aggregate software uptime in any meaningful way. The fastest way to find if the software vendor offers multitenant SaaS or is faking it is to check if they publish online, in real-time, their applications uptime, usually delivered via an independent third party.

Legacy client-server or single-tenant software cannot qualify for multitenancy, nor can it publish vendor’s uptime across all customers. Let’s take a look at definitions:

Single-Tenant – A single instance of the software and supporting infrastructure serves a single customer. With single-tenancy, each customer has their independent database and instance of the software. Essentially, there is no sharing happening with this option.

Multitenant – Multitenancy means that a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure serves multiple customers. Each customer shares the software application and also shares a single database. Each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants.

A multitenant SaaS provider’s resources are focused on maintaining a single, current (and only) version of the software platform rather than being spread out in an attempt to support multiple software versions for customers. If a provider isn’t using multitenancy, it may be hosting thousands of single-tenant customer implementations. Trying to maintain that is too costly for the vendor, and sooner or later, those costs become the customers’ costs.

A vendor invested in on-premise, hosted, and hybrid models cannot commit to providing all the benefits of an actual SaaS model due to conflicting revenue models. Their resources will be spread thin, supporting multiple software versions rather than driving SaaS innovation. Additionally, suppose the vendor makes most of their revenue selling on-premise software. In that case, it is difficult for them to fully commit to a proper SaaS solution since most of their resources support the on-premise software. In summary, a vendor is either multitenant or not – there is nothing in between. If they have a single application installed on-premise of customer or single-tenant cloud, they do not qualify to be called multitenant SaaS.

Before you engage future vendors for your enterprise ESG reporting or EHS compliance software, assuming you already decided to go with a SaaS solution, ask this simple question:

Can you share your software uptime across ALL your customers in real-time? If the answer is no, pass.

Multitenancy Explained

And if the vendor suddenly introduces a “multitenant” model (after selling an on-premises or single-tenant software version for 10+ years), who in the world would want to migrate to that experimental cloud without putting the contract out to bid to explore a switch to well established and market-tested actual multitenant providers? The first-mover advantage of multitenancy is a considerable advantage for any vendor. Still not convinced? Let me offer a simple analogy to drive home the point as to why service uptime and multitenancy matter: Tesla vs. Edison–War of Currents.

The War of Currents was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s that pitted companies against one another and involved a debate over the cost and convenience of electricity generation and distribution systems, electrical safety, and a media/propaganda campaign, with the leading players being the direct current (DC) based on the Thomas Edison Electric Light Company and the supporters of alternating current (AC) based on Nikola Tesla’s inventions backed by Westinghouse.

With electricity supplies in their infancy, much depended on choosing the right technology to power homes and businesses across the country. The Edison-led group argued for DC current that required a power generating station every few city blocks (single-tenant model). In contrast, the AC group advocated for a centralized generation with transmission lines that could move electricity great distances with minimal loss (multitenant model).

The lower cost of AC power distribution and fewer generating stations eventually prevailed. Multitenancy is equivalent to AC regarding cost, convenience, and network effect. You can read more about how this analogy relates to SaaS in the book by Nicholas Carr, “Big Switch.” It’s the best read so far about the significance of the shift to multitenant cloud computing. Unfortunately, the ESG/EHS software industry has lagged in adopting multitenancy.

Given these fundamental differences between different modes of delivering software as a service, it is clear that the future lies with the multitenant model.

Whether all customer data is in one or multiple databases is of no consequence to the customer. For those arguing against it, it is like an assertion that companies “do not want to put all their money into the same bank account as their competitors,” when what those companies are doing is putting their money into different accounts at the same bank.

When customers of a financial institution share what does not need to be partitioned—for example, the transactional logic and the database maintenance tools, security, and physical infrastructure and insurance offered by a major financial institution—then they enjoy advantages of security, capacity, consistency, and reliability that would not be affordably deliverable in isolated parallel systems.

Locus has implemented procedures designed to ensure that customer data is processed only as instructed by the customer throughout the entire chain of processing activities by Locus and its subprocessors. Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) provides the infrastructure used by Locus to host or process customer data. Locus hosts its SaaS on AWS using a multitenant architecture designed to segregate and restrict customer data access based on business needs. The architecture provides an effective logical data separation for different customers via customer-specific “Organization IDs” and allows customer and user role-based access privileges. The customer interaction with Locus services is operated in an architecture providing logical data separation for different customers via customer-specific accounts. Additional data segregation ensures separate environments for various functions, especially testing and production.

Multitenancy yields a compelling combination of efficiency and capability in enterprise cloud applications and cloud application platforms without sacrificing flexibility or governance.

Want to learn more? Reach out to our product specialists today.

Selecting ESG Software? Watch out for these 7 Red Flags

One of the biggest recent trends we have seen with novice ESG providers (both startups and major software providers new to the field) is a lack of substantial software tools presented. What is lacking is covered up by grandiose statements about the efficacy of their options. These statements are so vague that they could cover anything if you switched out references to ESG with any other nouns, since these providers don’t show their tools transparently.

Here are seven red flags to be aware of when selecting ESG software:

These providers prominently share statements and statistics about the current ESG climate, without any offering of how their software fits into the picture. This is a major ‘tell’ that someone is jumping on the ESG bandwagon without adequate expertise or software tools.
There is a lack of explanation about how their tools directly improve your ESG program. There is no mention of their dashboards or reporting options or other integrated tools. A seasoned software provider will happily share the specifics of what they offer.
You’ll find over-the-top flashiness on their website, but there are no software previews to be found. If they’re not showing an example of their software, it may be because it lacks functionality, or is theoretical.
Their site is filled with buzzwords. They will talk about reaching net-zero, about how their software is expert-led and data-driven. They will offer no insight as to how they meet these goals.
They will shy away from offering demonstrations. Instead, they will seek to have conversations where they make lavish promises about what their software will be able to do in the future. They may be quick to offer a PowerPoint presentation, but you’ll find that many organizations are reluctant to show their software in action. You deserve to see the software you intend to purchase.
No case studies or current customers can be found. If there’s not an example of their software in use, then it may not be worth exploring, or it may not exist.
If an ESG software provider has grown by acquisition, there are likely issues with software integration and staffing knowledge/support for the product. And if they’re owned by investors, it’s inevitable that they’re being packaged to sell, and they’ve raised prices to meet the needs of the investor.

So, what should you look for in an ESG Software Solution instead?

When selecting an ESG software solution, don’t waste your time with something that either isn’t functional or doesn’t exist. More importantly, your software should have a long track record of usability and be backed by years of expertise. Locus ESG software is proven and is a vital part of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s Clean Construction Program. It also helps Del Monte Foods meet their sustainability goals by improving analyzation and forecasting.

Want to learn more? See it for yourself. Reach out to our product specialists today.

Embodied Carbon in the Construction and Building Operations Industry

When we look at all the new construction in the next 20 years, we see the critical role embodied carbon plays. The world urgently needs to address carbon emissions from buildings and construction, constituting almost 40% of global carbon emissions. Of those total emissions, building operations are responsible for 28% annually, while building materials and construction (typically referred to as embodied carbon) are responsible for an additional 12% annually.

The construction industry is the world’s largest single industry. Oxford Economics estimates the global construction market at $10.7 trillion in 2020. The market is expected to grow by $4.5 trillion between 2020 and 2030 to reach $15.2 trillion.

Unlike operational carbon emissions, which can be reduced over time with building energy upgrades and the use of renewable and nuclear energy, embodied carbon emissions are locked in place upon completion of construction. The owners and construction industry must handle embodied carbon now if we hope to achieve climate change goals by target dates. Embodied carbon typically precedes Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and should be added to those for any new construction.

Achieving zero embodied emissions will require adopting the principles of reusing, reducing, and sequestering, including retrofitting existing buildings, using recycled materials, and designing for deconstruction. Reducing means material optimization and the specification of low to zero carbon materials. Sequester means including the design of carbon sequestering sites and the use of carbon sequestering materials.

Just three materials – concrete, steel, and aluminum – are responsible for 23% of total global emissions (most of the materials used in the built environment). Concrete is the second most-consumed substance on Earth after water. Overall, humanity produces more than 10 billion tons, about 4 billion cubic meters of concrete and cement per year, or about 1.3 tons for every person on the planet, more than any other material, including oil and coal. The consumption of concrete exceeds that of all other construction materials combined. Making modern cement and concrete has a heavy environmental penalty, being responsible for 5% or so of global carbon emissions. And yet, most of those emissions are not accounted for during regular carbon reporting protocols. Steel and aluminum are not much different.

All companies that want to be credible with their carbon reporting need software tools for embodied carbon tracking and management. For this reason, Locus has developed a SaaS application to manage and report embodied carbon data in real-time during construction projects. The Locus Embodied Carbon app, part of the ESG toolset, advances environmentally friendly infrastructure design and increases the ability to track and reduce emissions before being built in the new structure forever.

Locus’s Embodied Carbon management software automates carbon emissions management throughout the design and construction processes. It is one of the most ambitious real-time carbon management software programs in the US. Locus Embodied Carbon app helps site owners, construction companies, and the supply chain reduce embodied carbon from on-site construction activities and reduce air pollution from construction activities.

Locus Embodied Carbon application combines the advantages of Locus Platform’s multitenant SaaS with its powerful configuration tools and APIs that, for example, stream carbon data from construction equipment to online software. The construction industry now has precisely the ESG software solution they need to fit their business processes for the low carbon construction program management to incorporate other EHS compliance and Sustainability data on the same unified platform in the future.

Locus to Provide GHG Verification Services in Oregon

Locus Technologies has received accreditation by Oregon DEQ for GHG and CFP verification services.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 21 December 2021 — Locus Technologies (Locus), industry leader in environmental compliance and ESG software, has been accredited by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to provide verification services for mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting and the Clean Fuels Program (CFP). Locus is the first of a select few to receive approval for verification services.

The accreditation allows Locus to provide verification services for GHG emissions reports, which are now mandatory for facilities in the State of Oregon. The verification team at Locus consists of experts in all reporting requirements. Locus’ in-house Lead Verifiers are certified in all reporting types, including air contamination stationary sources, electricity suppliers, fuel suppliers, natural gas suppliers, natural gas systems, and process emissions. Locus verifiers are also certified for all report types under the Oregon CFP.

The Oregon Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) updated their rules in May 2020 to enhance the data collection of Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions. The adopted rules incorporate existing reporting and emissions accounting protocols into rule and improve the specificity of how emissions data are calculated, reported, and verified. The regulation requires mandatory reporting and verification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by third-party verifiers like Locus, starting in 2022.

“Locus is proud to become an accredited GHG and CFP verification body for the state of Oregon, as we have been in California since the inception of that program. We are continually committed to staying informed on new and updated ESG reporting frameworks, which we accomplish first and foremost through domain expertise. Our field expertise and industry knowledge allow us to provide a vital service, while also further expanding on our ESG software to support these new reporting programs” said Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus.

Building on over a decade of GHG verification experience, Locus remains the only software provider for collecting, managing, and reporting GHG emissions that is also an accredited verifier. Using this expertise, the software includes unparalleled tools for transparent and auditable calculations for GHG programs.

Don’t Trust Your ESG Reporting to Just Anyone

Is ESG the new gold rush? Some tech giants and startups seem to think so. With each passing day, more and more software providers throw their hat into the burgeoning ESG ring, hoping to cash in. While it’s perfectly reasonable for these companies to seek out profitable endeavors, most of those companies have limited real-world experience with ESG reporting and software. You may want to think twice about trusting your critical ESG reporting to someone looking to ride the wave toward a quick buck.

Locus has been developing and supporting ESG solutions for over two decades, before the ESG acronym ever made its way into headlines and boardrooms. In addition to the years of experience, Locus places great emphasis on domain knowledge, hiring experts in environmental science, engineering, sustainability, and mathematics to name a few. Our solutions are built and supported by these qualified experts, opposed to developers who are frantically cobbling together a solution that they can rush to market.

It takes years to develop a foolproof system for handling massive quantities of complex data. In a recent piece written by President of Locus, Wes Hawthorne, he delves into the importance of having accurate, audit-ready ESG reporting. Data quality and reporting accuracy have been pillars of Locus’ success since our founding in 1997.

Do more for your ESG program than applying a cookie-cutter tool meant to meet the bare-minimum needs of the many or an application that is new and untested, and unfit for your requirements. Our robust solutions help you manage impact, create reports with ease, and meet your ESG goals effectively.

Contact Us to Get Started Today

The Convergence of Augmented Reality and GIS

Today is GIS Day, a day started in 1999 to showcase the many uses of geographical information systems (GIS). Earlier blog posts by Locus Technologies for GIS day have shown how GIS supports cutting-edge visualization of objects in space and over time. This year’s post explains how GIS supports augmented reality.

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that enhances how we experience the real world by overlaying your surroundings with computer-generated objects. It differs from virtual reality (VR) because in VR, everything you see is computer generated, but in AR, the majority of what you see is real – your experience of reality is enhanced (augmented) but not totally replaced.

You are probably familiar with one AR application already if you watch American football. The ‘virtual’ first down line that appears on field before each play is projected there by computer and is not really painted on the field. If you follow soccer (or football to the rest of the world), AR is used by a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) to objectively determine tight offsides decisions. Digital lines are drawn across the field to show whether or not attackers are illegally past the last defender or not. Another AR example is the popular game Pokémon Go that shows cute virtual creatures in your living room or your front yard.

To experience AR, you need something to project the non-real objects onto your view of the world. Many AR applications use mobile phones or other devices. An AR application uses the camera view to show you the world around you and then overlays virtual objects onto the view. Other devices such as head mounted displays, ‘smart glasses’, or even ‘bionic contact lenses’ can use AR, but have not been as popular as phones or other mobile devices. In contrast to AR, VR cannot be fully supported with just a mobile device and usually requires headsets to immerse you in a virtual world. Because of this need, AR is much less intrusive than VR is.

Countless other examples of AR already exist in many fields. A few selected applications include:

Online shoppers at some e-commerce sites can use smart devices to project furniture into their home to see how the pieces look before making a purchase.
Some clothing stores can project clothing onto shoppers’ bodies to check appearance without having to change clothes. These applications require the user to be in a special dressing booth with full body scanning capabilities.
Urban planners use AR to display how planned buildings, cell towers, wind turbines, and other structures would look in the existing space. Planners can walk the streets and view how proposed projects would alter the existing cityscape.
AR is used in manufacturing to display operation and safety instructions in a worker’s field of vision using head mounted displays, which circumvents the need to refer to bulky paper manuals.
Utility managers can see underground pipelines, water lines, sewer pipes, electrical lines, and other infrastructure projected below their feet.

So how does GIS relate to AR? There are three main uses of GIS in AR:

Location: Any AR application must know where the user is and where to place virtual objects. In most cases, full GIS capabilities are not needed; instead, the application accesses a GPS (global positioning system) to find locations. Consider the Pokémon Go application mentioned before. The game knows where the various Pokémon need to appear. When a user plays the game, it uses GPS to find the user, and then shows any Pokémon that are near the user based on their locations.
Layers: An AR application may need to show features that are not visible to the user, such as underground electrical lines, earthquake fault lines, property lines, or planned buildings. All these features can be stored as GIS map layers in the cloud and then displayed in the AR application as virtual overlays projected on the real world. Furthermore, a user could select a displayed item and view related attribute information in the GIS layer. For example, a user could view the condition, age, and repair status of a selected water pipeline.
Navigation: An AR application may also need to help a user get from point A to point B, for example in a crowded airport or in a large warehouse. Such navigation could be facilitated by showing virtual route markers and arrows on the real world.

Locus has been exploring environmental uses of AR and GIS by adding AR to Locus Mobile, which is the Locus app for collecting field data, completing EHS audits, tracking waste containers, and completing other tasks requiring users to gather data out of the office. Locus Mobile now features an AR mode to assist users when taking field samples. When the user activates AR mode, the app uses the camera to show the user’s immediate area. The app then puts multiple virtual markers on the display corresponding to sampling points located in that direction. As the user moves or rotates the phone to change the viewing area, the markers change to reflect the locations in the user’s line of sight. Clicking a marker provides more information including the location name and the distance from the user.

Locus Mobile uses all three ways to combine GIS with AR:

By using GPS to find the user’s location and the locations of nearby sampling points.
By using GIS to display the layer of sampling points.
By using GIS to assist with navigation to sampling points by showing distance and direction.

Here is a sample image from Locus Mobile showing three nearby sampling locations along with information about past events or measurements at the locations. The three blue banners are the augmented reality displayed on top of the view of the nearby surroundings.

By using GIS and AR to assist users in finding sampling points, Locus Mobile makes field personnel more productive. Samplers can find field locations quickly and can easily pull up related information. Locus continues to explore using AR to expand the functionality of its environmental applications.

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!

[sc_button link=”https://www.locustec.com/applications/gis-mapping/” text=”Learn more about Locus’ GIS solutions” link_target=”_self” color=”#ffffff” background_color=”#52a6ea” centered=”1″]

[sc_image width=”150″ height=”150″ src=”16303″ style=”11″ position=”centered” disable_lightbox=”1″ alt=”Dr. Todd Pierce”]

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.

The Horrors of Excel for Data Management

Locus has been preaching on the pitfalls of Excel for a long time. It’s no surprise that one of the worst imaginable errors in Excel that could’ve happened, did. Almost 16,000 COVID-19 cases in England went unreported because Public Health England hit the maximum row count in their version of Excel.

This is not the only example of Excel being misused or being the wrong tool entirely for the job. Excel is not in any way a data management system for complex or vital data. When it comes to sustainability reporting and environmental data management, the evils of the grid are a force to be reckoned with. We have highlighted a few examples that will have you shivering.

Case 1: The Evils of Autofill

Take a look at this harmless-looking chart. It shows monthly electricity consumption for a facility set to report:

Month	Monthly Electricity Consumption (MWh)
January 2019	133,500
February 2019	122,400
March 2019	138,900
April 2019	141,600
May 2019	141,601
June 2019	141,602
July 2019	141,603
August 2019	141,604
September 2019	141,605
October 2019	141,606
November 2019	141,607
December 2019	141,608

During review, the auditor notices a distinct trend from April to December, indicating false data overwritten by a stray double-click. Eventually, the auditor required re-entering all invoice data for dozens of facilities to correct the issue. Where the original data went and how autofill went astray remains a mystery.

Case 2: The Phantom File Editor

Imagine using a massive spreadsheet with lots of linked calculations for your annual sustainability report. One of the team engineers works on the file to input more data and get it ready for presentation. But in the final steps, they accidentally delete one of the formulas that sum up the indicators. The annual total looks great for the presentation since you’ve effectively removed a portion of your resource consumption, but afterwards you discover the conclusions were incorrectly calculated. How did that error get introduced? The spreadsheet has no auditing capabilities on the individual values, so you may never know.

Excel supports multiple users editing one document simultaneously, but not well. Multiple records are saved, edits are lost, and vital data vanishes, or at best is very hard to recover. The Track Changes feature is not infallible, and over reliance on it will cause hardship.

Case 3: Date of the Dead

Excel has a frustrating insistence of changing CAS numbers into dates, even if they are something like “7440-09-7″ turning into September 7, 7400. If you’re not explicit in your cell formatting, Excel isn’t happy leaving values as they are.

Case 4: Imposter Numerical Values

You meant to type 1.5, but you typed “1..5” or “.1.5”. Does Excel reject these imposter numbers or let you know of a potential error? No, it’s stored in Text format. This can throw off any averages or sums you may be tracking. This minor identity theft can cause a real headache.

Other Significant Cases:

Other data quality issues with using Excel include, but are not limited to:

Locations with multiple variations of the same ID/name (e.g., MW-1, MW-01, MW 1, MW1, etc.)
Use of multiple codes for the same entity (e.g., SW and SURFW for surface water samples)
Loss of significant figures for numeric data
Special characters (such as commas) that may cause cells to break unintentionally over rows when moving data into another application
Bogus dates like “November 31” in columns that do not have date formats applied to them
Loss of leading zeros associated with cost codes and projects numbers (e.g., “005241”) that have only numbers in them but must be stored as text fields
The inability to enforce uniqueness, leading to duplicate entries
Null values in key fields (because entries cannot be marked as required)
Hidden rows and/or columns that can cause data to be shifted unintentionally or modified erroneously
Inconsistent use of lab qualifiers— in some cases, these appear concatenated in the same Excel column (e.g., “10U, <5”) while in other cases they appear in separate columns

As you can see, the horrors of Excel are common, and terrifying. Without a proper system of record, auditing features, and the ability for data to vanish into the ephemera, Excel offers little in the way of data security and quality for organizations managing vital environmental and compliance data. Many are learning firsthand the superiority of database management systems over spreadsheets when it comes to managing data. Now is the time to examine the specific shortcomings of your current system and consider your options.

Locus Technologies Receives 16th Consecutive EBJ Award for Information Technology in ESG

5 Major Signs That You Need to Replace Your Water Data Management Software

1. You’re transcribing data more than once or still using paper forms.

2. Product support is not helmed by specialists who support you adequately after implementation.