Waste E-Reporting Challenges
Waste management is a critical aspect of environmental sustainability and regulatory compliance. Companies who are using a data management software solution like Enablon to track their waste profiles, containers, and shipments are well-positioned to more easily generate routine, regulatory-required waste reports. However, even companies with mature data management solutions may struggle with the process of generating annual waste reports.
Annual waste reporting requires substantial time and resources to gather, validate, and submit reports of waste data. Additionally, data and formatting requirements for waste electronic reports (e-reports) vary by state. For companies who manage their waste data in a data management solution like Enablon, the standard process of generating and submitting waste e-reports may still require data extraction, manual manipulation, and thorough validation of the stored waste data. Additionally, waste reporting typically happens during the busy “environmental reporting season,” when EHS personnel may find themselves scrambling to meet numerous different annual reporting requirement across different media and regulatory programs during the same short window of time.
All of these factors make the waste e-reporting process manual, time-consuming, and error-prone, which can drain resources, reduce productivity, and make it difficult to confidently meet regulatory deadlines. There is a clear need for a more streamlined and efficient way to manage, gather, validate, and report waste data in accordance with regulatory agency e-report requirements.
Enablon Configuration Capabilities
Trinity has the expertise to customize your Enablon system to take the waste data that you are already tracking and automatically transform it into the final, state-specific e-reporting file format for import to the state agency. This streamlined configuration solution reduces the workload of the site EHS team during reporting season by reducing the number of hours required to produce these reports. The Enablon software provides flexible configurability, allowing Trinity to configure the system to meet all of the state-specific waste and data formatting requirements through a client-validated configuration approach. Reports that used to take hours to produce will now only take minutes!
Trinity’s Waste E-Reporting Solutions
Recently, Trinity implemented a waste e-reporting solution for an oil & gas customer operating in Washington state. To begin this process, Trinity met with the customer and gathered all relevant information and reference documentation that specified the agency data requirements for the e-reports (which data needed to be included, formatting specifications for the data, etc.). Trinity then used the information and reference documentation gathered to map the e-report data fields to the customer’s existing Enablon Waste module, identifying gaps and potential issues along the way.
To convert the Enablon Waste module data into an e-report-ready format, Trinity built many data translation and conversion capabilities into the Enablon software. This allowed the client to maintain their existing Waste module functionalities with no impact to end users, while also allowing for additional data presentation and reporting options so that the pilot facility could more easily meet the state-specific e-reporting requirements with minimal manual data manipulation. For example, we configured the Enablon software to convert data values from a single multi-link field into multiple single-value text fields, in alignment with the agency’s report formatting requirements; and we converted the Waste Profile ID value, an alphanumeric code in Enablon, into a number format, as required by the state’s e-reporting system. We also made smaller formatting changes that would normally require time and effort to complete manually, such as changing the output format of the various date fields to match the formatting
We worked closely with the customer throughout the process to ensure that we understood their needs and were aligned in how the system would produce the report output.
We configured the report solution and generated test reports for the customer, which helped the customer to proactively identify data quality issues in their existing waste data within the Enablon system. This allowed the client to clean up data discrepancies ahead of their reporting schedule.
The reports were then deployed for the customer to use for their waste e-reporting. This new customized report system simplified the process of generating the reports for the customer, reduced the number of hours it took to generate the reports, and improved the client’s overall data quality – both within the reports themselves, and also within the Enablon system as a whole. The client is now well-positioned to have an even easier process for reporting their waste data next year and beyond.
Trinity Support
Trinity has the expertise to customize your existing Enablon solution to address your Waste e-reporting challenges and save time and effort. Trinity has already configured this solution to meet the specific e-reporting needs of an oil and gas facility in Washington state, and our client-tested approach can easily be applied more broadly to meet the needs of customers operating in different states and reporting programs throughout the U.S. and abroad.
Trinity’s Digital Solutions group can help your company manage compliance with environmental regulations, meet reporting requirements, and minimize organizational risk. Our team of experienced EHS and IT specialists can provide your company with tailored support to address your specific risks and needs, every step of the way, including:
- Regulatory reviews;
- Applicability determinations for organizations and sites;
- Permit deconstruction and data loading;
- Task reviews;
- Audits/Assessments;
- Overall compliance strategizing, industry benchmarking, and best practice review;
- Business analysis and process harmonization support;
- Software selection, design, build, and deployment support;
- Report development support;
- System administration support; and
- Organizational change management support.
Trinity helps our clients analyze their products, services, operations, and environment to identify and document what regulations are applicable to them and what actions can be taken to ensure compliance. Trinity helps clients break down permit requirements, or requirements from plans into legal registers to help clients clearly understand what they must, and must not do, to comply with site-specific requirements.
We apply careful strategies to help clients avoid putting too much detail into systems, or not enough. Contact us today to explore your compliance and digital support needs, and we can help you to design and build a compliance management solution that works.
Contact our EHS Digital Solutions experts to learn more about our broad range of EHS digital solutions.
