The way industry deploys Health, Safety, Environment (HSE) and sustainability data is changing. New data management strategies and alternative ways to deliver tools are emerging through cloud computing. HSE On Demand, for example, enables better collaboration, and outsourcing delivers new services à la carte. These current trends are having a significant impact on how organisations collaborate and how they access, integrate and deliver data.

Over the past few years, HSE and sustainability have become more and more complex. Because industry must enter, clean, verify, complete and analyse a large amount of data in order to build HSE strategies, the way they manage this data is crucial. In the past, they often did this on paper. But times have changed, and new technologies are enabling new ways to manage information. On-demand and outsourcing made their entrance a few years ago and they are still gaining attention. Some say these will be the dominant models in the future, while others are less certain about this. To predict what might well happen within a few years, we spoke to seven experts on the subjects of HSE, sustainability, on-demand, and outsourcing:

  • Samir Temara, Consultant, Business development strategies and implementation
  • Stefan Vanhelleputte, CIO at Solvay
  • Pierre Van Asbroeck, Project Director at Alternative Carbon
  • Paul Vanhemelryck, HSE Applications Manager and REACH IT Leader at Solvay
  • Frédéric Tribel, HSE-IT Manager at Solvay
  • Eric Nuez, HSE Team Leader at Rhodia
  • Philippe Prudhon, Director of technical affairs at the Union of Chemical Industries (UIC).

Each one offered his point of view on what the future holds for information management in HSE and sustainable development in European industries.

From do-it-yourself to on-premise

Over the years, we’ve seen several incarnations of platforms in the evolution of HSE and sustainability information management systems. “In the past, let’s say 20 years ago, we used to build our own software,” says Stefan Vanhelleputte, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Solvay. “Then, 15 years ago, software packages appeared on the market. You simply assembled the elements to have your own software. Then, we went a little bit further: instead of building the application ourselves, we outsourced the development of the software package. But you still had to buy it and you ran it on your own computer. Today, we go even further than that: we don’t buy the hardware or the software, and sometimes we don’t even run the package ourselves.”

From on-premise to on-demand

The first wave in the current evolution of information management is on-demand software. “Today, the technical environment can be in the hands of a supplier that provides services to a variety of customers though the internet,” says Vanhelleputte. We encounter on-demand software in our daily lives via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google mail, Google Docs, etc. All are software applications we subscribe to on the internet, but we do not need to run them on our own servers. This method of delivery has found its way into European industry in software systems such as Salesforce.com, which has made CRM enterprise software accessible to everyone.

On-demand software is in

On-demand software is an application shared by all companies, housed on an external server, which you access through the internet. This way of deploying software has a lot of advantages. “With on-demand, you reduce the total cost of ownership and benefit from economies of scale,” Solvay’s Paul Vanhemelryck explains. Pierre Van Asbroeck, Project Director at Alternative Carbon, thinks that SMEs, in particular, will benefit from on-demand software: “On-demand will probably have more advantages for small and mid-sized companies, because they can benefit from a well-developed system without having to pay for it integrally.”

Not all companies have the expertise to develop software themselves. The skills that are required are often too expensive to develop and maintain in-house, especially for small businesses. Thanks to on-demand, those companies can now benefit from this expertise without having to pay mountain-high costs. The costs are shared by all of the companies (large and small) subscribing to the service. Using a shared platform also enables you to access the required information quickly and continue with your core business. “The company that uses on-demand services can focus all its efforts on the results the application generates, not on all the intermediate steps like managing a server, updating a database, and so on,” says Frédéric Tribel, HSE-IT Manager at Solvay. We can imagine that this will help improve data quality as well. Companies can now focus on the accuracy of the data they input, which will automatically lead to better output results.

Another big advantage of on-demand is the way you pay for it. With on-demand, you pay for what you consume. According to Vanhelleputte: “It’s like your home electricity bill – if you don’t switch the light on, you’ll not have to pay for it.”  That’s the big difference with on-premise software: with on-premise, you pay for the entire package, whether you use it or not. On-demand allows flexible usage: “You can increase your service as you wish. If you need more, you simply order more. If you need less, you order less,” adds Tribel.

On-demand applied to HSE

According to Tribel, companies should consider on-demand solutions for all of their business processes except those that are key differentiators: “A company must always stay in charge of a key business process that is a competitive advantage. The information management for this process will require very specific solutions that probably don’t exist in on-demand services.” On-demand software is developed for processes that are similar in almost all companies. Like e-mail for instance: all companies can use Gmail. But if your company’s key differentiator is e-mail, you’ll probably want a special e-mailing system that has more features than those that are available in Gmail.  In that case, you’ll have to develop it yourself.

However, HSE is often not a key differentiator. Everybody has to do the same things in these areas, every company has to comply with the legislation. So, on-demand can be very useful in improving your way of working with HSE. On-demand will be more secure and the software will be easier to use. For Environment, for instance, you must manage your waste, emissions and other pollutants. There is so much information that, in order to improve your performance in these areas, you’ll have to treat, compare, analyse and so on.

On-demand will also increase the accessibility of HSE data, which is certainly useful when a company has a lot of subsidiary sites all over the world. An internet connection is the only thing you need to access your information.

Information on sustainability can also be easily managed with on-demand software, but in this case the difference between on-premise and on-demand is not great. Sustainability is the process of measuring certain criteria to see whether or not your company is sustainable. As long as your data are protected, whether they are processed in an internal or external data center doesn’t make much difference.

The benefits of outsourcing

The second wave in the evolution of information management is outsourcing. Companies do not always have the time or expertise to manage their information properly. If your core business is chemistry, that’s what you need to focus on. For other activities within your company – like IT, HSE, HR, sustainability, etc. – you’ll have to hire other people. With outsourcing, you pay an external company of specialists to do this work for you, so you can focus on your core business. Thanks to economies of scale, every company can benefit from the external expertise at a reasonable cost.

Outsourcing is very widely used for HSE, in particular. So much is regulated in this area that everyone must do the same things – which is the perfect situation for outsourcing. Whether you are BASF, Solvay or a company around the corner, you still have to comply with REACH, for example. Tasks involving legislation are often outsourced to experts automatically. In most countries, for example, an environmental impact assessment must be performed by a certified company.

Van Asbroeck goes even a bit further, maintaining that HSE should be completely outsourced to specialised people who have experience in a variety of companies and sectors of activity. A company could never afford this kind of expertise on its own. But Van Asbroeck doesn’t think large corporations are ready to do that: “It’s still a bit touchy. Companies want to keep control over environmental and safety information, so they have to be sure that the information is not distributed or shared with others. It can be dangerous if those things are not communicated correctly.”

The dominant models in the future

On-demand and outsourcing are gaining attention in HSE domains, and they might well be the dominant models in the future. As HSE and sustainability become increasingly complex, as new regulations are implemented worldwide, it will become more difficult to be compliant. Companies will no longer be able to handle these areas internally at low cost.

The HSE world is ready today for outsourcing and on-demand solutions. The next step is to integrate the various on-demand solutions that are available, thus improving efficiency. When all on-demand services work together, managing HSE information will be a piece of cake.

Emilie Laurent

 

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