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The Role of Technology in Driving EHS Strategies and Business Growth

February 3, 2021

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2020 truly was a year like no other. While the effects of Covid 19 continue to linger, there is a renewed sense of optimism amongst everyone. In the sustainability and tech sector, we also witnessed rapid innovations that enabled enterprise resilience. Most businesses also stopped to take a good look at their Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) standards, keeping their people as top priority. 

The pandemic has highlighted severe compliance issues for EHS in recent months. These efforts are now slowly becoming more tech led, as we embrace a digital first world. It is critical to ensure that employees take appropriate precautions and stay safe. The global EHS services market has already crossed a worth of $2.4 billion in 2020, and digital EHS services are proposed to grow by a 6% compound annual growth rate to reach $3.2 billion in the next three years. 

Technology, thus, has a key role to play in the growth and development of EHS models. Compared to other functions of corporate sustainability, EHS has been slow to adapt to tech, but now is the time to move on to the digital bandwagon. The future will be driven by intelligent technological intervention, and EHS professionals need to now ensure that they have the right tools to lead this digital growth.

In fact this need is becoming top priority as traditional processes are slowly becoming redundant. A few challenges that enterprises may face with older EHS models in place include:

Incident focus vs people focus: Traditional EHS management shows an overwhelming focus on preparing for incident management, with little focus on people. This also means limited incident datasets, since only few enterprises have proper tracking mechanisms. The industry has seen a push towards digital traces of incident causal factors. This is required to maintain the integrity of these factors, to eradicate them as effectively as possible.

Lack of data – Inspection and incident reports may be picking up, but their datasets are still mostly small and unmanaged. Some organizations may also face a solutioning overload when they bring tech into the picture. But this needs to be remedied at the earliest, to generate real time, valuable insights that the EHS team can trace easily.

Lack of digital experience: Poorly designed, outdated systems form a critical challenge to creating digital first EHS strategies. This stems from a limited understanding that teams have about digital first initiatives. Building a digital first strategy takes more than just technology, it takes expertise, time and effort that needs to be integrated within the larger organization.

Lack of trust and transparency: Small enterprises and big data analytics can get somewhat tough to manage. EHS teams are responsible for reporting to both internal as well as external stakeholders, and the use of digital technologies may raise concerns about the sensitivity of data. This is also true for older businesses with a massive data overload.



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