Building a Compliance Management System Using Microsoft Software
Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) compliance requirements at most industrial facilities involve extensive data collection, review, validation, documentation, communication, and reporting. Employees are often overwhelmed with daily scheduled and unplanned events. It is not uncommon to learn that a plant has developed numerous spreadsheets, each with multiple checklists for various types of tasks in different schedules. These checklists must be updated for compliance certification on a regular basis. Since the mid-1990’s, many companies have implemented robust Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) solutions to streamline and manage the daunting compliance management process. With the improvement of computer software technology, the availability of these EMIS solutions has grown in number and functionality to address a multitude of tasking, data management, analysis, and reporting requirements.
While these systems are ideal for many organizations, they are often out of reach for others due to their complexity and the costs associated with licensing, implementation, and maintenance. One alternative to these out of reach solutions is configuring Microsoft’s standard software suite to address EHS department needs. With the emergence of Microsoft’s SharePoint technology, organizations are finding that many of their supporting functions, business processes, and workflows can be enhanced or automated in very cost effective ways. For EHS professionals, this technology introduces a new way to approach compliance management business processes without giving up the investment in the Microsoft productivity tools (e.g. Excel spreadsheets) that have been the foundation of EHS compliance management for most organizations for over 20 years. Whether it is managing a compliance calendar, enabling incident workflow, tracking EHS metrics, or enhancing EHS accountability, the technology now exists to make step-wise or even transformational changes within EHS compliance management.
Course Topics
This seminar introduces the concept of building a complete compliance management system using SharePoint and other Microsoft products. By integrating some or all of the above applications, a solution can be configured to address many, if not all, of the requirements of both small and large compliance programs in a customizable, scalable, and cost-effective way.
We will discuss and demonstrate how environmental, health, safety, and sustainability requirements can be managed using an in-house or hosted regulatory compliance management system built on the Microsoft solution platform.