Technology | Locus Technologies

Utilizing Wearable Tech for EHS

In August 2014, we wrote on the potential use of wearables for EHS professionals. Less than a year later, the Apple Watch was introduced, revolutionizing the market. Now, wearables in the EHS space aren’t a hypothetical. Roughly a fifth to a quarter of Americans wear a smartwatch daily. Wearables are undoubtedly one of the biggest trends in EHS, with a seemingly endless number of uses to promote a more efficient and safer workplace.

Despite recent growth, wearables are still in their infancy when it comes to EHS. Verdantix anticipates that companies will spend 800% more on connected worker devices in twenty years, an explosion in utilization. This year alone, over 20% of surveyed companies are reporting an increase in budget for wearables for EHS purposes. While demand from organizations is growing, most EHS software is yet to adapt to market needs, with few offering wearable support.

Locus is prepared to meet the needs of the market, by integrating wearable support with our mobile application. Here are a few ways to best utilize your smartwatch with Locus Mobile:

[sc_icon_with_text icon=”notification” icon_shape=”circle” icon_color=”#ffffff” icon_background_color=”#52a6ea” icon_size=”big” level=”h3″]

Smart notifications

Custom and priority notifications can be tailored to fit the needs of professionals in your organization, increasing engagement and response time.[/sc_icon_with_text]

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Keep track of routine samples

Calendar alerts directly to your wearable, so that no samples are missed by field technicians.[/sc_icon_with_text]

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Location tracking

Get alerted when you’re entering a safety zone that requires specific PPE.[/sc_icon_with_text]

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Vital signs

Track worker vital signs for faster response time in the event of an emergency.[/sc_icon_with_text]

If your organization is looking to implement wearable tech, Locus product specialists are ready to discuss your needs and how we can help.

Contact us to learn more or request a demo

Oil companies agree to reduce methane emissions

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.

The Emerging and Innovative Blue Tech Industry

Have you heard of the Blue Tech market? Blue, as in blue water, is an emerging sector, with its roots coming from European entrepreneurs, that focus on developing leading edge products to ensure clean water. I took a deeper dive into the new area and found a lot of interesting products and solutions such as miniature sensors to detect micro organisms, bacteria as well as robotic fish housed with optical sensors. The advances and innovations are quite remarkable and clever, however the real challenge for these budding companies will be the mindset of the water industry. Products however relevant products must first and foremost guarantee safety, reliability and scalability. For water leaders, these key requirements will always trump innovation.

Don’t get me wrong. I embrace innovation. After all, Locus is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. As with all innovative products, timing is a key factor in success, and for Blue Tech products, the timing might be off. According to the American Water Works Association (AWWA), water utilities are now focused on repairing, updating and expanding its infrastructure, and in the United States, the cost of that will exceed $1 trillion over the 25 years. Industry motivators are ensuring water safety, managing supply, and balancing demands of an ever increasing population. I hope for the sake of innovation that some of these products become “must have” rather than a “nice to have”. Only timing will tell.

Using the New 4K Display Technology Could Be a Disruptive Catalyst for New Environmental-based Solutions

The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) unleashed a plethora of new products to improve the daily lives of consumers. One product that caught my environmental eye was the Hewlett-Packard HP Zvr. ZDNet describes the new hologram-based screen as a step toward “true holographic viewing”.
The reporter, Larry Dignan, goes on to say “a test drive of the display was notable, because it allowed you to manipulate content, dissect frogs, inspect the inner workings of the heart and play with architecture options.” I have personally not seen the display, but the idea of inspecting the inner workings of the heart got me dreaming of environmental-based solutions. Could 3D (in this case, 4K screen technology) be used to view underground contamination of water aquifers? Imagine using 4K imagery, coupled with analytical data of water chemistry in our EIM system, add smartphone-delivered real-time field data plus smart apps and you have a complete and unique turnkey environmental package. Compliant heavy industries initially would benefit most, as they could finally collect previous unattainable data as well as display an accurate picture of contaminants and their impact on environment. Is a fully-integrated visual environmental 4K real time application in the future? One observation is certain, the rate of technology innovation, and more importantly, the rate of adoption, over the past 10 years surpasses even the wildest imagination.

Locus to Attend and Co-present with Honeywell at the NAEM 2013 EHS and Sustainability Software Conference

Achiever of the Week, Environmental Business Journal

EBJ BUSINESS ACHIEVER OF THE WEEK: LOCUS TECHNOLOGIES.

14 June 2007 — This week we salute Locus Technologies, winner of a 2006 Business Achievement Award in the IT Merit category for continuing the development of its EIM software, a package that allows companies to upload and view environmental information pertaining to their sites and facilities—exclusively over the web—using an on-demand model (i.e., “Software as a Service”). During 2006, Locus added portal infrastructure through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows users to integrate EIM’s web-based applications to any other application. In effect, the company says, this added capability makes EIM the “Yahoo” of the environmental world. Locus also expanded EIM to work with the popular Google maps. A user can now add overlays of environmental information to a Google map and display shadowed “info windows.” The result is a Google map mashup, a web application that seamlessly combines EIM content from more than one source into an integrated presentation. Using this mashup, EIM provides a data box listing the chemical concentration in groundwater, borehole information, and other relevant environmental information associated with location. Customers selecting the EIM package during 2006 included ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Northrup Grumman and Texas Instruments.

For more information on the EBJ Business Achievement Awards please visit www.ebionline.org.

Locus introduces eSite

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 17 May 2006 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental data and information management services, announced today that it has released its newest offering in the LocusFocusSM suite of products, called eSite. eSite is an exciting online software service developed specifically for the clients with a portfolio of environmentally impacted sites. eSite is designed to help streamline and organize important environmental information about a company’s sites. It is particularly
geared toward those organizations with hundreds, or even thousands, of properties at which environmental conditions must either be monitored or remediated.

eSite’s design was based on input from customers struggling to keep on top of environmental issues at their manufacturing, retail, Superfund, and other sites across the county and around the globe. After reaping significant benefits from moving their sampling and analytical data into Locus’s EIM™ (Environmental Information Management) system, these customers expressed a desire to have a related place on the web to store and retrieve more basic types of site information, including assets, regulatory and environmental history, as well as real estate, permitting, compliance, project schedule, treatment technology, and strategic planning data. Information on contractors, consultants, law firms, laboratories, and agencies; budget summaries; site operational history and property history; significant regulatory events; chronologies of environmental investigations, monitoring studies, and cleanup actions; current project schedule; and anticipated future actions and strategies. Given the more than 20-year life-cycle of many environmental projects, maintaining this information in a secure and easily accessible website has become just as important as streamlining the sampling and analytical data management process.

In one simple application, eSite preserves the mission-critical environmental history of each site and makes this knowledge accessible to senior managers, as well as site supervisors. Interface to Google Maps and portfolio-wide data summaries are key components of the system, thus, making the management of hundreds of sites a far more efficient activity.

According to Locus Technologies president and CEO, Neno Duplancic, “eSite is just what our customers have been asking for–it’s a simple and elegant solution to a ongoing environmental management problem. When site consultants change every 3 to 5 years, and site managers change just as frequently, keeping track of the simple things becomes a headache. With eSite, a company’s key environmental information and knowledge is managed over time, thus providing long-term continuity and knowledge retention. In addition, accumulated knowledge can be shared among sites with similar contaminants, geological settings, or other common parameters. A site manager, for example, can use eSite to search among a list of suppliers for any with similar and relevant closure experience at other sites. In short, we expect eSite to provide our customers with an important knowledge-based tool for managing their portfolios in as efficient manner as possible.”

“eSite is built using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that will allow many of our clients to integrate their own home-grown solutions into it. When it comes to environmental data and information, nothing in the enterprise should exist in isolation—companies must leverage existing data and application assets by provisioning them as shareable services,” adds Duplancic.

eSite will be available to customers under Locus’s Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which allows customers to reduce costs of environmental data management and software by streamlining and simplifying ownership and maintenance.

Locus Technologies chooses Tibco Software to improve customer experience in a real-time operating environment

TIBCO PortalBuilder Platform of Choice for Locus’s New Enterprise Portal Offering

PALO ALTO, Calif., 1 May 2006 — TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX), a leading business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business, today announced that Locus Technologies, the leader in on-demand environmental data management software and services, has selected TIBCO PortalBuilder® for the development and management of a new customer-facing portal offering.

Through its award-winning LocusFocus family of products and services, Locus Technologies provides a comprehensive suite of Web-based environmental information management applications to help companies meet the complex challenge of managing, sharing, and visualizing large sets of environmental information on demand. Using TIBCO PortalBuilder, the company plans to expand LocusFocus to include a new portal offering, to provide customers with a single point of access for viewing and analyzing large amounts of data consolidated in real-time from multiple environmental sites.

Using TIBCO PortalBuilder, the LocusFocus enterprise portal will include feature-rich user capabilities, including analytical data management and document control; storage and management; and Web-based remote sensing, control, and automation of treatment systems. By providing capabilities, such as visualization, document management, single sign-on and rolebased authorization in a unified platform, TIBCO will help Locus improve the overall customer experience, while simultaneously simplifying application and system management.

In addition, Locus will use TIBCO PortalBuilder to automate how their customers actually interact with, and perform environmental data management. The new enterprise portal will include features in which users can manage waste disposal, plan/schedule sampling events, generate reports, create maps of sites, and view other related documents, all within a consolidated, context-specific visual environment.

“Our goal is to lower our customers’ overall cost of remediation, while attaining the required cleanup objectives through the use of technology,” said Neno Duplancic, president and CEO, Locus Technologies. “TIBCO PortalBuilder was selected for its powerful ability to integrate systems, services, and processes in a way that’s also optimized for rapid deployment. In the past, our customers spent large amounts of consulting man hours searching for information.Now, they can spend that time analyzing and acting on their key environmental data—not looking for it—leading to faster and less expensive site closure, maintenance, and monitoring. We can now offer a single, unified system for managing environmental issues that’s easier for our customers to navigate and for us to manage.”

TIBCO PortalBuilder plays an integrated role in an enterprise service-oriented architecture by enabling easy assembly of composite applications that span multiple heterogeneous systems. Based on industry standards and utilizing intuitive configuration-based administration, TIBCO PortalBuilder enables organizations to rapidly develop and deploy portals without significant coding, ultimately reducing time, cost and risk.

“As more companies move to service-oriented architectures (SOA), the enterprise portal is becoming the face of the business,” said Ram Menon, senior vice president, Marketing and Strategy, TIBCO. “Companies that don’t ensure a consistent and positive user experience across applications will suffer the consequences of customer dissatisfaction. This is particularly true for the emerging environmental industry that is already data-intensive and will become even more so by introducing large volumes of data and analytics as it moves toward real- time monitoring and performing analytics in a geographic area across multiple customers. TIBCO PortalBuilder will help Locus to differentiate itself as one of the most customer-focused, innovative vendors in this emerging market.”

ABOUT TIBCO
TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ:TIBX) is a leading business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business. Real-time business is about helping companies become more cost-effective, more agile and more efficient. TIBCO has delivered the value of real-time business, what TIBCO calls The Power of Now®, to over 2,500 customers around the world and in a wide variety of industries. For more information on TIBCO’s proven enterprise backbone, business integration, business process management, and business optimization solutions, TIBCO can be reached at +1 650-846-1000 or on the Web at www.tibco.com. TIBCO is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.

TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, The Power of Now , TIBCO Software and TIBCO PortalBuilder are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

Locus and Rockware announce new additions to LocusFocus EIM

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 24, 2006 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in environmental data management, and RockWare, Inc., a developer and reseller of environmental, geotechnical, civil engineering, and GIS software, announced today that Locus’s EIM environmental database has added exports to RockWare’s Rockworks software, used by environmental professionals worldwide. Locus’s EIM environmental data management system is the world largest online environmental database system used by some of America’s largest corporations at thousands of environmental remediation sites worldwide.

This new feature reinforces Locus’s philosophy of making environmental data management simple and streamlined, so customers realize the greatest benefits and cost savings from managing their mission-critical environmental information. The Rockworks exports join EIM’s other import/export features, including support for EPA’s Staged Environmental Data Deliverable (SEDD), ESRI Arcview, AutoCad, California’s Geotracker EDF, New Jersey’s HAZSITE, and EPA’s Region 2 and 5 formats.

Locus’s President and CEO, Dr. Neno Duplancic, said, “Our philosophy behind environmental data management is simple – create the most robust online environmental database management system in the world and provide the users with the tools and features they want and need to gain value and efficiency in the complex task of managing the huge heterogonous volumes of environmental data that are so critical to environmental site closure. By consolidating data in a single location, with the benefits of customer ownership, data consistency and user access, we solve 99% of the issues associated with environmental data management. By providing links to ancillary specialty environmental software applications, we capture the additional 1%. Users can keep familiar processes and tools, while the customer rests assured that their data resides in a single location, thus reducing costs and risks over the lifetime of the project.”

Locus obtains certified status in Microsoft Partner Program

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 26 January 2005, — Locus Technologies (Locus), a leader in environmental information management, today announced that it has earned Microsoft Certified Partner status for software developed as part of Locus’s award-winning LocusFocusSM suite of environmental business solutions. The LocusFocus suite is a web-based environmental data management system – EIM™, along with Locus’s other environmental portal software applications for document management, environmental remediation system automation, waste management, and the soon-to-be-released air data management module.

“Only companies that have demonstrated high levels of customer service, proved their experience, and attained advanced certification receive the designation of Microsoft Certified Partner,” said Allison Watson, vice president of the Worldwide Partner Sales and Marketing Group at Microsoft. “Today, Microsoft recognizes Locus Technologies for its skills and expertise in providing customer satisfaction with Microsoft products and technology.”

Locus is pleased that its industry leading, web-based environmental database is based on Microsoft technology. “We find the Microsoft name to be immensely valuable when selling systems to Fortune 100 companies who value EIM’s Microsoft database engine behind the scenes,” said Dr. Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus. “With more than 5,000 sites worldwide and millions of environmental records being managed in EIM, it’s clear that having a Microsoft database engine is a key differentiator in the marketplace and provides our clients with a high degree confidence in our systems.”

Microsoft appreciates companies like Locus that have skills and expertise in providing customer satisfaction with Microsoft products and technology. Microsoft Certified Partner status proves a high degree of competency and expertise with Microsoft technologies. Standards for acceptance into Microsoft Partner community are strict. To achieve Microsoft Certified Partner status, Locus satisfied Microsoft Competency requirements by proving its
ability and proficiency to develop high-quality products and software solutions based on Microsoft technologies.

“We are extremely pleased to have earned certified status in the Microsoft Partner Program. The certified status allows us to promote our relationship with Microsoft to our customers. The benefits provided through our certified membership will allow us to continue to enhance the offerings that we provide for customers,” added Dr. Duplancic.

The Microsoft Partner Program was launched in December 2003 and represents Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to the success of partners worldwide. The Microsoft Partner Program offers a single, integrated partnering framework that recognizes partner expertise, rewards the total impact that partners have in the technology marketplace, and delivers more value to help partners’ businesses be successful.