EDMS: Overlooked Necessity for New Sites to Ensure Compliance

EDMS systems such as MonitorPro are important tools for companies engaged in high-liability industries, or for those supporting them, to ensure environmental accountability and compliance.  Without a designated EDMS, companies will find it difficult to record, track, and provide the environmental data required by authorities to meet their environmental permit requirements, which can result in failed audits, permit breaches, fines, and site closures.

However, an EDMS is a tool often overlooked by new operations, with many relying on disjoined spreadsheets or paper-based records.  As a result, they often cannot provide a fully traceable and auditable record of environmental monitoring data to demonstrate compliance. This lack of transparency increases the risk of permit breaches and leaves them accountable for any negative environmental impacts found at their sites.  This may have considerable implications for both the site and company, including site closures and significant financial penalties.

MonitorPro is an EDMS which simplifies environmental compliance in a single application and offers several key advantages for managing environmental data at new operations, each of which will be discussed below.

Implementing an EDMS from the outset ensures your operation can demonstrate its environmental compliance from the start, with fully traceable data records ready for submission to the required authorities.

This removes accountability risks at a later date from a fragmented system of spreadsheets and paper-based documents. Reconciling data records from the above approach can be time-consuming and can often result in incomplete records, missing data, and limited visibility of what has been collected. Without robust tracking of data, data gaps can go unnoticed which may result in environmental regulation breaches, potential fines and site shutdowns.

Having MonitorPro as your EDMS means you have a fully auditable data trail from background data collection through site construction and into production, it provides a system which enables you to track the environmental data from collection through to reporting, with any edits made to the data logged and users notified. This ensures transparency and accountability at every stage of the data lifecycle.

MonitorPro simplifies reporting to external authorities by supporting a range of regulatory submissions. Reports can be designed and generated within MonitorPro by the user to display the required information including; maps, tables and graphing options. 

These can then be exported to .pdf for submission, examples of this include the Nevada NDEP reports. Data can also be exported into the formats required for uploading directly into regulator’s systems such as British Columbia’s EnMoDS.

Having an EDMS like MonitorPro in place means consistent data standards can be established from the start, helping to simplify and automate data inputs and reporting.

Without consistent data standards in place, data inputs can become complicated and inconsistent, requiring more time for data corrections and reporting. Data standardisation also helps reduce the risk of duplicate or missing records.

Keeping data formats and variables consistent from the start helps simplify reporting internally and to authorities. MonitorPro utilises validation, drop downs for data inputs and predefined report formats to ensure reports will always be consistent. This can help remove potential confusion with differing variable names and report formats and removes the need for time-consuming data cleansing prior to reporting.

Having an EDMS in place at the start of production simplifies the initial implementation saving time and money and makes it much easier to scale up when required in the future.

MonitorPro is easily scalable meaning you only need to invest the features and users you need saving money, without compromising on functionality.  Its scalability allows you to expand functionality and user access as you need them.

An EDMS like MonitorPro demonstrates a company’s transparency with regulators, investors and the local community, which in turn can build trust and confidence.  MonitorPro provides a clear, consistent, and validated reporting system, reducing the risk of non-compliance while increasing productivity. Robust data management and tracking helps strengthen complaint management.

MonitorPro’s customisable dashboards are a way of easily displaying and sharing data to interested parties to provide a real-time insight into a site’s environmental performance.  Dashboards can be fully customised by the user to display a variety of different widgets including; graphs, tables, mapping, text, and photos. These can be shared to read-only users, with permissions that can be controlled to only show data you want

Having an EDMS system in place can streamline permitting and approvals by ensuring data is organised, accessible and easy to review.

Regulators can easily track environmental performance from the early exploration phase through to full operation. This can help enable smoother approvals by reducing delays associated with incomplete or poorly structured data.

MonitorPro enhances productivity through several built-in tools, including:

• Reducing time spent on routine reporting and tasks with MonitorPro’s automation tools
• Quick access to powerful in-built tools for data visualisation
• Real time resolution of issues with email alerts notifying users immediately where there are issues to resolve.

These capabilities reduce time spent on routine tasks increasing efficiency and in turn saving money.  It also means any breaches or issues are highlighted quickly and appropriate steps can be taken to resolve them.

MonitorPro has been constantly developed over the past 25 years, working closely with our clients to deliver a system with powerful features and up-to-date technology.  Other systems can be outdated and offer unsupported or outdated functionality. Here at MonitorPro, we have moved with the times, ensuring that today’s MonitorPro provides our users with a system that delivers the levels of expertise they expect from EHS Data, along with a modern, web-based program that is continually updated to provide the latest and best features.

Our team at EHS Data are highly experienced and can provide users with the highest level of support and expertise during the initial MonitorPro implementation and beyond. We do not simply outsource your implementation, and you will not have to rely on consultants to help manage your data. We are here for you and will ensure you get the best from your MonitorPro system.

Contact us today to find out how we can help with your environmental management and take the stress out of being compliant.