Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) efforts protect workers across a wide range of industries and help mitigate negative impact to the environment. Scattered throughout the corporate world, EHS professionals work hard to keep businesses operating within regulatory compliance while safeguarding the health and welfare of employees. While many aspects of EHS are directed by government regulations, it ultimately falls to the employer to provide a safe and healthy work environment.
Environmental, health and safety is a core component of strategic business and purchasing software to manage business processes related to EHS should be viewed as a smart investment. There are many factors, both material and intangible, that should be evaluated in order to determine the overall benefit of environmental, health and safety software to your organization.
Intangible Benefits
- Improved employee morale, often due to an increase in the belief that management truly cares about safety. This can lead to measurable benefits such as lower absenteeism, improved satisfaction survey scores, and lower staff turnover.
- Improved safety culture, which can be a result of employees seeing EHS processes and programs as beneficial instead of a burden, as well as the belief that management cares. This can lead to fewer incidents which will drive down costs.
- Improved safety program effectiveness, due to the EHS team’s ability to focus on people instead of paper processes.
Direct Savings Benefits
- Lower safety related costs should be the result of fewer injuries. Costs related to safety usually manifest in claims, including workman’s compensation.
- Preventing accidents at your place of business or operation can mitigate costly legal fees
- Lowering the number of incidents can lead to a lower Experience Modification Rate (EMR), which will in turn lower premiums
Return on Investment
In order to assign a value to the direct savings from an Environmental, Health and Safety software system, Return on Investment (ROI) should be calculated.
You might participate in some of the following activities in order to properly calculate ROI for your business:
- Gather the number of employees who work on producing reports for OSHA, EPA, clients and other constituents such as these.
- Determine the average percentage of work time spent entering data, consolidating data, producing reports, sharing reports, and looking through old data and figures.
- Consider the average salary of EHS professionals allocated to doing the work described above. When an automated solution is in place, employees can spend time on valuable work outside of data management.
- Optionally, consider the benefits of having better visibility into your EHS data. Remember to consider lower incident related costs, and the commercial benefit value of having lower incident rates or being able to achieve certain industry certifications.
Accidents and injuries are costly in both financial and human terms. Employers must recognize that they have a duty to provide a safe and healthy workplace to those who work for their company or operate at one of their worksites. A sound EHS program driven by software can help companies fulfill obligations to their employees while adding value to the organization and cutting costs related to safety.
See how EHS Insight can help you implement the best value in safety software available today.