Efficient EHS Reporting For the Oil and Gas Industry
When looking for a GHG reporting program, there is one element that is typically overlooked. This short video gives us more insight.
See Your ESG Data Like Never Before
Todd Pierce explains in this short video how Locus Technologies data portability can be available for all your data needs.
Getting the most out of configurable EHS and ESG software
Director of Sales Engineering, Steve Paff, highlights Locus Software’s configurable hierarchy and how versatile it can be.
Foster Farms Selects Locus Technologies EHS/ESG Enterprise SaaS
Locus EHS/ESG Cloud will streamline Foster Farms EHS Compliance, ESG Reporting, and Water Quality Management.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 2, 2023 — Locus Technologies, the leading EHS Compliance and ESG software provider, today announced that Foster Farms, a top US provider of fresh, frozen, and prepared poultry products and the leading brand of fresh chicken in the Western U.S., selected Locus’s award-winning enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) to organize and manage their EHS compliance and ESG reporting.
Foster Farm subscribed to an integrated set of apps offered in the Locus Cloud Platform. Some apps include EHS Compliance Management, ESG and Sustainability, GHG Emission Factor and Calculation Management, Inspections, Configuration Workbench, Air Emissions Management, Storm Water, Wastewater, and well data management and reporting.
Locus Cloud is the first fully integrated multitenant platform created from the ground up to allow organizations to manage their environmental, energy, water, waste, carbon, air, health and safety, remediation, water quality, and compliance information in one place. The Locus Platform allows companies to configure their own management, tracking, visualization, and reporting through a graphically driven user interface. This feature enables organizations to configure the software to their needs without worrying about the expensive programming outlays usually associated with customization and single-tenant deployments.
When designing integrated EHS/ESG SaaS, Locus sought to make the complicated workflow and management of environmental data as simple as possible and to make it manageable from a single platform with shared components. The resulting platform offers immense flexibility and endless capabilities with minimal training thanks to the new, intuitive, user-friendly interface design.
“The accurate tracking and reporting of critical environmental resource usage is a necessary part of our compliance responsibilities, and a major component of our efforts to ensure that we are a sustainable producer. The Locus application software will make a significant contribution to our resource management capabilities,” said Don Hill, Foster Farms Director of Environmental Affairs.
“We are delighted that Foster Farms recognized the power of the Locus Cloud platform. Businesses do not want to shop for point solutions from different vendors only to be left with the nightmare of integration, security, synchronization, and vendor management. They want one-stop shops and to avoid having to deal with vendors that don’t integrate well with one another or have spotty service and limited support. Locus will provide Foster Farms single platform through which they can accomplish all their environmental and compliance management needs on a single, fully customer-configurable platform,” said Neno Duplan, President, and CEO of Locus. “Keeping the end user’s perspective in mind, we’ve packed the same 26-plus years of domain expertise that Locus has been offering all along into a highly configurable and scalable software platform built from the ground up on the latest web technologies,” remarked Duplan.
ABOUT FOSTER FARMS
Foster Farms is dedicated to providing families across America with great food. From ready to cook chicken and turkey, to chicken nuggets and corndogs, Foster Farms portfolio of fresh, frozen, and prepared foods, are always welcome whether it’s dinner time or snack time. Since its founding in 1939 Foster Farms has gone on to become one of the largest quality poultry producers in the United States. Headquartered in Livingston, Ca with facilities in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana, the company has nearly 12,000 Team Members, and is committed to building a “culture that nobody wants to walk aways from.”
Locus Technologies Receives 17th Consecutive EBJ Award for Information Technology in ESG
Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) recognized Locus for ESG software growth and innovation.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 2 March 2023 — Locus Technologies, the leading EHS Compliance and ESG software provider, received their 17th 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 EHS, compliance, sustainability, and ESG.
Locus continues to expand its ESG SaaS solution, including built-in business intelligence tools for interactive, actionable insights into unified EHS compliance and ESG data, forecasting tools predicting future ESG reporting, APIs for utility data sources, and interfaces with third-party systems that house ESG data. Locus’s ESG solutions focus on “enter once, report to many.” enabling companies the efficiency of reporting to multiple organizations and numerous standards from a single dataset. Essential built-in reporting includes state or federal regulations and ESG based on standards, including CDP, GRI, SASB, TCFD, and many others.
“Locus’s pioneering work in integrated ESG reporting and EHS compliance software 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.
“With energy transition, climate resilience, and new federal programs driving business, as well as traditional environmental market drivers in infrastructure, air quality, remediation, water and wastewater it is understandable that companies that offer integrates SaaS platform like Locus has advantage.” added Ferrier.
“As Locus continues to expand our EHS and ESG software we would like to thank EBJ for recognizing Locus again for a 17th consecutive year and for noting the new functionality and growing customer base we achieved in 2022. Locus will continue this trajectory into 2023 with new tools designed to simplify EHS and ESG management in our award-winning Locus software, which offers a single system of record and truth for our customers. Locus SaaS platform enables our customers to manage their carbon transactions and inventory with the same rigor, confidence, and transparency as their financial ones.” said Neno Duplan, the Founder and CEO of Locus Technologies.
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.
Locus at 25 Years: A Unified Approach to EHS and ESG
Locus’s strategic focus has always been to deliver intelligent, well-designed software applications that add value to customers’ bottom lines. The success of these applications is rooted in the deep environmental domain and content experience of the Locus team, its proven data management capabilities, and its view that customers who own their data maintain a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Locus’s perseverance developed the world’s first commercial online environmental information management, collaboration, and compliance system. Locus’ EIM revolutionized how environmental data is stored, accessed, managed, and reported— ultimately saving customers time and money and giving them the power to be “green on demand.” Locus Platform gave customers tools to consume EIM data in various applications built on top of it, communicating with each other. Locus delivered the industry’s first unified EHS compliance and ESG reporting system.
Locus SaaS has evolved to encompass more and more aspects of strategic business planning. While a critical incentive to using Locus Platform and EIM systems is regulatory compliance, Locus has taken a more comprehensive view of the mandate to improve environmental stewardship by creating plans to improve environmental performance across clients’ organizational silos; sites, and regulatory programs; emission sources to air, soil, or water; energy management; all aspects of Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) issues, sustainability and ESG reporting, and technology platforms and mobile devices.
While most environmental software firms have focused on tracking one area of concern, such as greenhouse gases or incident management, Locus built the most comprehensive software platform for managing compliance and organizing environmental and resource data and information. Using Locus’ SaaS, customers can collect, organize, search, report, maintain, and preserve all the required documentation and data for environmental compliance and sustainability management. Locus integrates risk management, compliance, sustainability management, and water quality management under a single umbrella. Locus software integrates with other enterprise resource planning software—part of the big picture for governance, risk and compliance (GRC), risk management, compliance, and health and safety software.
Our holistic view of GRC enables transparency and connectivity across an organization – sparking the insights that most organizations need to make better decisions.
Our SaaS platform supports leading organizations by:
- Providing visibility into GRC and ESG across their organizations
- Automating workflows to increase efficiency and scalability
- Keeping customer’s businesses compliant with regulatory standards
- Delivering real-time insights and reports through robust storyboards for data-driven strategic decision making
The resulting Locus applications, primarily EIM and Locus Platform, help companies better record, track, manage, analyze, and share information regarding water, air, energy, waste, sustainability, ESG, and EHS compliance management.
This is the sixth post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here. This series continues with Locus at 25 Years: Innovative Approach and Plans.
The Past, Present, and Future of EHS & ESG
To celebrate a milestone 25 years of success in EHS and ESG software development, we sat down with Locus President, Wes Hawthorne for a brief discussion. In this post, we ask him a series of questions highlighting the past, present and future of EHS and ESG.
1. What are the greatest challenges that environmental professionals are facing?
One of the persistent challenges we’ve seen for the past 25 years is that the responsibilities of environmental professionals are continually expanding. Previously, almost all environmental work was localized, with facility-level permits for air, water, waste, etc. That has expanded over the years to include new regulations and reporting requirements for sustainability, social metrics, and other new compliance areas, while the old facility-level programs still continue. This has led to more pressure on environmental managers to keep up with these programs, and increased reliance on tools to manage that information. That’s where Locus has always focused our effort, to make that ever-expanding workload more manageable with modern solutions.
2. What are the most interesting trends in EHS and ESG?
The current flood of interest in ESG is certainly notable as far as bringing corporate attention to the environmental field, as well as having requirements originate from the SEC here in the US. We have become accustomed to managing oversight from multiple regulatory bodies at the local, state, and federal level, but SEC would be a newcomer in our line of work. Their involvement will be accompanied by a range of new requirements that are common for the financial world, but would be unfamiliar to environmental staff.
Across other EHS fields, we are seeing increased demand for transparency in EHS functions. Overall, this is a positive move, as it brings more attention to EHS issues and develops a better EHS culture within organizations. But this also drives the need for better tools to make EHS information readily available across all levels of the organization.
3. What are the most disruptive technologies available today?
As far as technologies, the ones most likely to have significant impact in the environmental field are ones that don’t require a significant capital investment. Although there are definitely some practical advantages to installing smart monitoring devices and other new technologies, procuring the funding for those purchases is often difficult for environmental professionals. Fortunately, there are still many technologies that have already been implemented successfully in other fields, but only need to be adapted for environmental purposes. Even simple changes like using web-based software in place of spreadsheets can have a huge impact on efficiency. And we haven’t yet seen the full impact of the proliferation of mobile devices on EHS functions. We are still working on new ways to take advantage of mobile devices for data collection, analysis, and communication purposes.
4. What do you think are the biggest innovations of the last 25 years in our field?
We’ve seen a number of innovation milestones in the past 25 years, and while we didn’t invent SaaS, we’ve been largely responsible for adapting it and perfecting it for environmental purposes. One of the major innovations we’ve integrated into our products include online GIS tools where users can easily visualize their environmental data on maps without expensive desktop software. Another one was our fully configurable software platform with built-in form, workflow, and report builders tailored for environmental purposes, which allows anyone to build and deploy environmental software applications that exactly match their needs. There have been many other innovations we’ve incorporated into our software, but these two stand out as the most impactful.
5. Where do you see Environmental and ESG reporting in the future?
More and more, we are seeing all types of reporting being converted into pure data exchanges. Reports that used to include regulatory forms and text interpretations are being replaced with text or XML file submittals. This transition is being driven largely by availability of technology for EHS professionals to generate and read these files, but it is also promoted by regulatory agencies and other stakeholders receiving these reports. Stakeholders have less time to read volumes of interpretive text, and are becoming more skeptical of potential bias in how facts are presented in text. These are driving the need for more pure data exchanges, with increasing emphasis on quantifiable metrics. These types of reports are also more readily compared against regulatory or industry standards. For reporters, lengthy corporate reports with volumes of text and graphics are becoming less common, and the success of an organization’s programs will be increasingly reliant on robust data sets, since ultimately only the data will be reported.
6. What has been the key reason for Locus’ success for the past 25 years?
There are actually a few that immediately come to mind. One reason is the nature of our continually evolving products. By providing our solutions as SaaS, our software adapts with new environmental requirements, and with new technologies. If our software was still the same as it was 25 years ago, it simply wouldn’t be sufficient for today’s requirements. Since our software is updated multiple times each year, it is difficult to notice the incremental changes, but they can be readily seen if you compare today’s software with the original in 1997. And we’re committed to continuing the development of our products as environmental needs change.
The other primary reason for our success is our excellent staff and the environmental expertise we bring to our customers. We simply could not provide the same level of support without our team of environmental engineers, scientists, geologists, chemists, and an array of others. Having that real-world understanding of environmental topics is how we’ve maintained customer relationships for multiple decades. And our software only has value because it is maintained and operated by staff who appreciate the complexity and importance of environmental work.
Mr. Hawthorne has been with Locus since 1999, working on development and implementation of services and solutions in the areas of environmental compliance, remediation, and sustainability. As President, he currently leads the overall product development and operations of the company. As a seasoned environmental and engineering executive, Hawthorne incorporates innovative analytical tools and methods to develop strategies for customers for portfolio analysis, project implementation, and management. His comprehensive knowledge of technical and environmental compliance best practices and laws enable him to create customized, cost-effective and customer-focused solutions for the specialized needs of each customer.
Mr. Hawthorne holds an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and B.S. degrees in Geology and Geological Engineering from Purdue University. He is registered both as a Professional Engineer and Professional Geologist, and is also accredited as Lead Verifier for the Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Low Carbon Fuel Standard programs by the California Air Resources Board.