Ahead of its time in 2002, Locus Platform (formerly ePortal) has seen a huge change over time from a simple portal at the beginning of the SaaS movement, to a fully configurable multi-tenant platform. Locus Platform (LP) houses any number of off-the-shelf and custom applications to meet EHS customer needs.
A recent NAEM study explored the main reasons EHS&S professionals look to replace their current software configuration. Among the most reported issues were overall performance, customer support, and software customization. The following infographic highlights both why EHS&S professionals are seeking new software, and wheat criteria are most important in shopping for a new software system.
[sc_button link=”/why-locus/” text=”See why others choose Locus” link_target=”_self” color=”#FFFFFF” background_color=”#52a6ea” centered=”1″]
Last week Locus attended the first training session offered by California Air Resources Board (CARB) for verifiers under the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program. The California LCFS program has been ramping up over the past several years, and is now ready to start certifying third-party verifiers to review both applications and routine reporting.
The LCFS program is part of California’s initiative to meet the AB32 requirements of reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and 40% lower than that level by 2030. LCFS is specifically intended to address emissions from transportation fuels in California, which are approximately half of the overall emissions statewide. Like the Greenhouse Gas Mandatory Reporting Rule and Cap-and-Trade programs that preceded it, the California LCFS program uses a market-based approach to incentivize innovation and new approaches to reduce emissions.
Seth Lalonde, Locus Environmental Scientist, at the California Air Resources Board Training
The program covers a wide variety of projects, including production of alternative fuels (e.g. renewable diesel and biogenic compressed natural gas), innovative approaches to fossil fuel production and refining, and direct carbon capture and sequestration. Fuels are assigned a carbon intensity based on overall carbon dioxide emissions over the entire life cycle, from production to processing to shipping to consumption. The carbon intensity is essentially a measure of the emissions from the fuel per unit of energy. The lower the carbon intensity value, the less impact the fuel has in terms of carbon emissions. Certain fuels can even have a negative carbon intensity, which essentially means the fuel production process is absorbing more carbon than is eventually emitted to the atmosphere (such is the case for compressed or liquefied natural gas produced using biomethane from manure collection). The program also has impacts well outside the California border. After all, fuel that is eventually used in California can originate anywhere in the world, and the LCFS program allows for these projects to obtain credits regardless of their location.
Unsurprisingly, California was the first state to adopt and implement a LCFS program, and the first to establish a third-party verification program specific for LCFS. Although it was clearly the first presentation of this training material, staff from CARB as well as the Climate Action Reserve and The Climate Registry were on hand to assist in addressing questions and topics that weren’t covered in the prepared materials. And considering the wide variety of LCFS project types and the disparate backgrounds of attendees for the verification training, they did a great job of getting everyone all the information they needed to understand and verify these projects.
First and foremost, like any market-based emission program that includes a verification or auditing requirement, transparency is critical. The verifiers are trained to dig deep into your data, and not to take ‘no’ for an answer. Be prepared to have your metadata and documentation assembled and easily made available to the verifier. (For more on Transparency in Reporting, view this webinar)
Second, the LCFS program includes requirements for continuous or near-continuous monitoring for many parameters, and instrumentation capable of electronic data archival. Manual data records and transcription are still acceptable under other carbon offset programs, but under LCFS these options are no longer allowed. Be sure that your instrumentation is consistent with the specific LCFS requirements, or you’ll be seeing a non-conformance from your verifier.
There were many other tips and common pitfalls highlighted during the training for specific LCFS project types. Overall, I’m very excited to see how the LCFS program evolves in California, and how the energy industry takes advantage of these incentives to provide new options for transportation fuels that will reduce carbon emissions.
Update: Locus is now an approved verification body for the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Learn more here.
[sc_button link=”/services/lcfs-verification/” text=”See our LCFS verification services” link_target=”_self” centered=”1″]
Sustainability is a corporate necessity, and finding the right software to support company-wide sustainability goals and initiatives is imperative to streamlining this time-consuming activity. This is especially true if you are managing inputs from many facilities/locations or have required or optional reporting requirements. Not to mention, most corporate annual reports demand a summary of key sustainability initiatives as part of the corporate annual reporting process.
Here are some features to look for when selecting a sustainability software—to make sure your new software will actually help your company track and report its sustainability initiatives more accurately and efficiently.
This is especially important when dealing with company locations in various geographic regions. A well-designed software system can solve this most vexing problem: finding the relevant data.
Data can come from multiple sources, and your sustainability software should be able to handle them all—then consolidate this data into a single source of truth.
Any decent software can make data collection easy, but to truly improve your company’s sustainability initiatives, it must also have tools for quality assurance reviewers and third-party verifiers to easily review the information, track the reported values to source data, and understand how the data were processed. Ultimately, the software also needs to allow the reporter to easily make updates or corrections as needed. Because these data are reported to regulators or shareholders, accuracy is paramount.
Look for the following features to support transparency and auditing:
Your sustainability software should make it easy to see and understand the formulas that produced any calculated data values.
Many companies report to various regulatory or voluntary bodies, and the software you select should support all the major reporting requirements to avoid the need for separate calculations for some jurisdictions.
Find out what formats you need for regulatory reporting, and make sure your software supports exporting in these formats.
If you normally report 500 metric tons of GHG per year and you are finding entries of 500,000 metric tons per year in your data, chances are, it’s just simple data entry errors. However, no one wants to track these down months after the data entry event. Look for software that will flag these anomalies on entry and force the user to fix them before you ever get to the data review step.
Immediate, inline alerts about outlier data values help prevent last-minute surprises.
The sustainability software you select should help simplify data entry and reporting by supporting your preferred workflows. Software with configurable workflows can be a huge help for both data entry personnel and managers reviewing data, by making the status of all data entry and reporting business processes abundantly clear.
Options for managers to lock down data are important for preventing edits to data that is being prepared for reporting.
There should be an easy way to see the current workflow status of any data in your system.
All software that handles critical or regulatory data should provide auditing on key data fields. Find out the details of what is audited and how you will be able to access the audit information.
Your software should be automatically recording a history of all changes at each step of your workflow.
Every software has built-in report and dashboards, but they may not meet all your needs out-of-the-box. Assume some reports will need to be configured, and review the software accordingly.
Look for options to easily configure reports, charts, and other visualizations that help you easily review summaries of your data.
Software can shoulder the burden of getting people to do what they are supposed to do (reminders), alerting people to when an action is needed (notifications), sharing information (messaging) and sending them information (report notifications). Be sure to review the strength of all notification features of the software, as this can be a huge help during reporting season—and it can lighten the burden on your inbox as well.
While you are evaluating software options, use these points as a guide to make sure you choose a solution that will truly make a difference for your organization’s sustainability initiatives and reporting goals.
As more sustainability software solutions appear in the marketplace, it can be difficult for a company to discern which features really matter for its workflow. Try a simple exercise—imagine what a perfect sustainability management business process would look like if you found the perfect software solution. Consider the challenges you face now, and what it would look like if those problems were handled by your software.
Then, ask how well the sustainability software you’re considering will make this dream a reality. The right software selection can help reduce operational risk, fulfill regulatory reporting requirements in less time and with less effort, and provide safeguards against bad data and missed deadlines. All you have to do is ask the right questions.
[sc_button link=”https://www.locustec.com/white-paper/complete-guide-evaluating-ehs-software/” text=”Download eBook” link_target=”_self” background_color=”52a6ea”]
Locus Technologies is proud to have attended this year’s NAEM EHS&S Forum in Toronto. We were represented by Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus, and forum first-timer, Aaron Edwards, Marketing Associate at Locus.
The forum gave us the opportunity to learn, both from our peers in discussions about EHS&S goals, and from the diverse lineup of respected speakers and presenters. You spoke and we listened. This year, the prevailing topic of discussion was the growth of expectation surrounding sustainability in organizations.
Sustainability initiatives are rapidly moving to the forefront of institutional policy at leading organizations. As consumers, investors, and shareholders are increasingly supporting more sustainable organizations, executives are expecting more impactful sustainability initiatives from their EHS&S departments. Not only that, but executives inherently expect sustainability initiatives to positively affect the bottom line. This means that today’s EHS&S professionals have to manage sustainability initiatives that are vital to company success as well as regulatory management and reporting, often with limited resources.
Our conversations at the NAEM Forum often revolved around the time-consuming nature of regulatory compliance interfering with the escalated focus on sustainability. Many of the professionals we spoke with are dealing with multiple EHS&S platforms, each used for a specific function. Time management is increasingly more essential to EHS&S managers, and juggling between uni-tasked platforms is detrimental to effective sustainability efforts.
Locus developers have designed our software to reduce the labor-intensiveness of regulatory compliance. We offer a configurable single-platform solution for decreasing the amount of time you spend managing KPIs. From available modules in waste management, audit tracking, GHG reporting, and more—our configurable software allows more time to improve your company’s sustainability initiatives.
Sustainability is no longer an afterthought in the eyes of executives, consumers, investors, or shareholders. Having one robust software platform can greatly help EHS professionals integrate that “&S” seamlessly with their other responsibilities.
[sc_button link=”/company/contact/” text=”Continue the conversation” link_target=”_self” color=”ffffff” background_color=”52a6ea” centered=”1″]
We all know the struggle of getting things done with shortened staff without compromising the quality of our work, especially in EHS. Locus Technologies’ Locus Platform (LP) offers multiple options to ease your complexity by providing a truly SaaS platform packed with some nifty apps. Here are some tools in LP that can help you utilize your workforce much more efficiently:
Every software has built-in report and dashboards, but they may not meet all your needs when purchased off the shelf. If you need a new report, chart, or other visualization of your data, it usually incurs a custom software development charge, but not with Locus Platform (LP). LP allows you to assemble the information you want in your chosen format (bar or line charts, maps, tables, treemaps, diagrams, etc.) and share your custom dashboards and real-time information/data with your team. In addition, the views and dashboards export to Excel, so you can easily integrate with commonly used tools and further mine the data. At the enterprise level, powerful dashboards will help you understand the status of each facility based on a matrix you design. With the LPs flexibility, facility information can be automatically populated based on the user credentials, saving your team time and frustration.
Locus Platform’s Sustainability application and calculation engine support simultaneous calculations using multiple methods for various reporting programs including EPA, California ARB, CDP, TCR, DJSI, and others. This allows users to input data only once and utilize it to report to multiple federal, state, and voluntary reporting programs, according to their required format. The application will also support direct electronic reporting formats for many reporting programs, so that additional manual transcription and submittal of data are no longer necessary. This is a very powerful tool and a huge advantage to customers in terms of improving efficiency, while reducing costs.
Integration, if done correctly, can save you a great deal of time and headache during some of the most tedious and cumbersome tasks in EHS data management. Locus Platform (LP) has built in a unique point and click integration application to enable connection with major databases or third-party systems that have open API (Access privileges). Some integration, database, and communication standards and methods that are supported include OLE compliance, SOAP, COM, Java, XML, web services, ODBC/ODMA/SQL/Oracle, VIM, and MAPI. LP also works well with MS Excel and provides a powerful two-way synchronization allowing users to download parts of the database to Excel, then work, edit, and verify or append data on their local copy of Excel where they have no internet connection. Any revisions they perform to the downloaded data in Excel can be automatically synchronized back to the Locus Platform application. During the process, a complete audit trail will be preserved. This can be a great time saver especially when you are sending large volumes of valid values in a database or if you are migrating any historical data.
Locus’ Mobile application allows you to sync with your server to create data collection profiles on a mobile device, whether it’s your phone or a tablet. It will allow you to click through and enter data on the device even when you are offline. Data validation is performed in real time and is stored locally on the device, once the phone reaches an internet signal, it will sync with your server, and the data will automatically be updated in Locus’ cloud-hosted solution. What’s more, Locus Mobile works seamlessly with both EIM and Locus Platform.
Using Mobile you receive the benefits of data entry directly on the mobile device, with immediate data availability on the cloud when you reach an internet signal. Other advantages of using Mobile include location metadata and mapping integration, bar-code/OR code scanning, voice recognition, and form customization. If you’d like to know more about the Locus Mobile application, check out the Top 10 cool features in Locus Mobile.
Locus has prioritized enhancing its GHG application in Locus Platform to make it easy to manage GHG emission inventory tracking and reporting requirements. Locus Technologies is the only software vendor that is a certified GHG verifier under the State of California’s AB32, and has performed the most GHG verifications in California since 2015. The State and Federal eGGRT web portals are notoriously cumbersome and require a significant amount of your time to input all the required data and generate your report. But with XML support, you can bypass almost the entire data entry process, and complete your submittal within a few minutes. XML reports support many greenhouse gas subparts, including EPA GHG Subparts C, D, W, and NN. And because data entry for EPA and CARB is consolidated in the XML GHG application, it eliminates the need to maintain separate agency spreadsheets and software. Additional reporting programs are also adding support for XML submittals, such as EPA’s eManifest. This functionality can be a huge time saver for anyone working with these online regulatory reporting tools.
A coalition of the world’s oil companies agreed to reduce methane emissions from natural gas extraction—part of an effort to shore up the climate credentials of the hydrocarbon.
The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative said it would target reducing methane emissions to less than 0.25% of the total natural gas the group of 13 member companies produces by 2025.
Methane is the main component of natural gas. During extraction, transport, and processing, it often leaks into the environment. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. In the short term, it traps more heat although it stays shorter in the atmosphere. According to the International Energy Agency, one ton of methane is equivalent to as much as 87 tons of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame.
Natural gas production is growing. Many big oil companies are increasing production of natural gas to offset higher emissions from other hydrocarbon and coal sources. The switch makes the oil-and-gas industry look better when demonstrating emission reduction to limit climate change.
For that reason, some oil companies, Shell, in particular, has tilted its production mix toward more gas output.
According to 2018 report by the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, as much as $34 billion of global gas supply is lost each year through leaks and venting. That is another valid reason to limit those methane escapes and park the proceeds to the bottom line. That in itself could fund part of the effort to stop or reduce the leaks.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 24 April 2018 — Locus Technologies (Locus), a leader in multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environmental compliance and sustainability management, today announced it will offer its award-winning EHS Locus Platform SaaS on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Locus announced it will deliver Locus SaaS services designed to simplify and expand how customers capture, analyze and take action on their data and EHS compliance activities. Additionally, Locus announced that the AWS US West (Oregon) Region will be the first new AWS Region supported in Locus’ planned international infrastructure expansion on AWS. Locus’ customers will be able to use the company’s core service—including Locus Platform and more—delivered on AWS, with general availability expected in May 2018. Locus Environmental Information Management (EIM) will be moved to AWS in early 2019.
Locus also plans to deliver integrations that will connect the Locus Platform with AWS Internet of Things (IoT), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Locus intends to leverage AWS IoT by building a new native integration to help businesses generate value from the billions of events generated by connected devices such as real-time environmental monitoring sensors and environmental treatment systems controls.
AWS IoT is a set of cloud services that let connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications like Locus Platform and other devices. Locus IoT Cloud will connect with AWS IoT to combine device data with customer data in Locus Platform, allowing businesses to create meaningful customer experiences based on real-time activity and emissions monitoring across all their connected sensors and devices.
For example, a water utility company that maintains millions of IoT-enabled sensors for water flow, pressure, pH, or other water quality measuring devices across their dispersed facilities can use AWS IoT combined with Locus Platform as a whole solution to ingest and manage the data generated by those sensors and devices, and interpret it in real time. By combining water sensor data from AWS IoT with Locus IoT customer data, the water utility company will be able to automatically create an emergency shutdown if chemical or other exceedances or device faults are detected and will be better prepared to serve their customers.
By combining the powerful, actionable intelligence and rapid responsiveness through Locus Platform with the scalability and fast-query performance of AWS, customers can seamlessly analyze large datasets on arrival in real time. This will allow Locus’ customers to instantly explore information, find insights, and take actions from a greater variety and volume of data—all without investing the significant time and resources required to administer a self-managed on-premises data warehouse.
Locus Platform offers a highly configurable, user-friendly interface to fully meet individual organizations’ environmental management needs. “Locus Platform, when combined with the power and security of AWS, can improve companies’ data collection, analysis, and most importantly, reporting capabilities, resulting in streamlined EH&S compliance and the mitigation of regulatory risks and fines.” said Wes Hawthorne, President, Locus Technologies.
International shipping produces about 1,000 million tons of CO2 annually – that’s more than the entire German economy.
A meeting of the International Maritime Organisation in London that starts tomorrow will discuss how shipping industry can radically reduce its CO2 emissions. The shipping industry, if it does not change the way it operates, will contribute almost a fifth of the global total of CO2 by 2050. A group of nations led by Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, Panama, and Argentina is resisting CO2 targets for shipping. Their submission to the meeting says capping ships’ overall emissions would restrict world trade. It might also force goods on to less efficient forms of transport. This argument is dismissed by other countries which believe shipping could benefit from a shift towards cleaner technology. European nations are proposing to shrink shipping emissions by 70-100 percent of their 2008 levels by 2050.
The problem has developed over many years. As the shipping industry is international, it evades the carbon-cutting influence of the annual UN talks on climate change, which are conducted on a national basis. Instead, the decisions have been left to the IMO; a body recently criticized for its lack of accountability and transparency. The IMO did agree on a design standard in 2011 ensuring that new ships should be 30 percent more efficient by 2025. But there is no rule to reduce emissions from the existing fleet.
The Clean Shipping Coalition, a green group focusing on ships, said shipping should conform to the agreement made in Paris to stabilize the global temperature increase as close as possible to 1.5C. The pressure is on the IMO to produce an ambitious policy. The EU has threatened that if the IMO doesn’t move far enough, the EU will take over regulating European shipping. That would see the IMO stripped of some of its authority.
Some say huge improvements in CO2 emissions from existing ships can be easily be made by obliging them to travel more slowly. They say a carbon pricing system is needed.
Blockchain is a highly disruptive technology that promises to change the world as we know it, much like the World Wide Web’s impact after its introduction in 1991. As companies look to the blockchain model to perform financial transactions, trade stocks, and create open market spaces, many other industries are looking at utilizing blockchain technology to eliminate the middleman. One sector well-positioned to benefit from blockchain technology is the data-intensive Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHS&S) space.
In particular, I see three major ways that the EHS industry can utilize blockchain technology to change how they manage information: 1) Blockchain-based IoT monitoring, 2) emissions management, and 3) emissions trading.
My belief is that blockchain technology will help to quantify the impact of man-made emissions on global warming trends and provide tools to manage it. One cannot manage what one cannot measure!
Imagine this: every emissions source in your company, whether to water, air, or soil, is connected wirelessly via a sensor or another device (thing) to a blockchain ledger that stores a description of the source, its location, emission factors, etc. Every time that the source generates emissions (that is, it is on), all necessary parameters are recorded in real time. If air emissions are involved, equivalent tons of carbon are calculated and recorded in a blockchain ledger and made available to reporting and trading entities in real time.
Blockchain ledgers may exist at many levels. Some may record emissions at a given site. Others at higher levels (company, state or province, country, continent, etc.) may roll up information from lower level ledgers.
Suppose that emissions are traded so that they are not yours anymore. In that case, someone else owns them, and you do not need to report them again, but everyone knows that you were the generating source. The same logic can be applied to tier 1, 2, and 3 level emissions. Attached to the emissions ledger are all other necessary information about the asset generating those emissions, financial information, depreciation schedule, time in service, operating time, fuel consumption, operators’ names, an estimate of future emissions—the list goes on.
To learn more how blockchain technology will impact emissions monitoring, management, reporting, and trading click here.