Driving Digital Transformation Of EHS With A Pragmatic Approach To Innovation - Part 1

ProcessMAP > EHS Software > Driving Digital Transformation Of EHS With A Pragmatic Approach To Innovation – Part 1

On a recent ProcessMAP EHS Leadership Roundtable, I had the opportunity to share highlights of some of the most impactful innovations that ProcessMAP brought to fruition in 2020. Despite being a year of crisis and uncertainty, 2020 was also a year where flexibility, resilience, and innovation were paramount for ProcessMAP. Like many of our customers, our team also had to adapt very quickly to the changes going on around us, including closing our offices and moving our workforce to 100% virtual in March 2020.

That move to a remote workforce did not slow the ProcessMAP team down. Besides launching a virtual customer-roundtable very quickly, we also co-innovated with customers on many solutions related to the pandemic. Within three weeks, we launched a suite of mobile-first COVID-19 solutions to support our customers as they navigated through the pandemic.

From the start of the pandemic, ProcessMAP partnered with customers to quickly identify and address their needs with the release of several COVID-19-related mobile-ready apps. In addition, we helped customers to identify best practices and how we could leverage many of ProcessMAP’s existing offerings and modules to ensure customers could manage all COVID-19-related illnesses and concerns. We recommended tools to help customers to identify pandemic-related health concerns and common controls as part of the Risk Assessment process and offered easy ways to assess customers’ pandemic preparedness plans, to conduct daily inspections that might be focused on different preparedness and response activities, as well as facility cleaning and disinfection, home office risks and even effective hygiene practices.

Many ProcessMAP customers helped to contribute to the Employee Health Management solution. Within a span of just four weeks from ideation to the actual release, ProcessMAP’s product development team worked seven days a week to ensure that customers had access to a solution that would allow them to manage and standardize employee screenings, and also track the entire health lifecycle, from the time that an employee had a positive COVID-19 screening, and they were not cleared for work, up until the point that the employee was able to return to work.

During 2020, our team invested more than 30,000 hours in research and development, and launched three major releases where we delivered more than 450 enhancements to our platform, an increase of 10% over the previous year. Working with the EHS Leadership Roundtable audience, customer councils, and our user groups, we added new functionality to help leverage such modules as Occupational Health to support our customers’ COVID-19 screening processes and their management of employees who were not cleared for work.

Because of a recommendation that was prioritized by our Incident Management Customer Council, we helped to streamline the investigation process in Incident Management. We also facilitated integrations with risk assessments and training to provide an easy mechanism to help customers identify and remediate any type of missing or insufficient Risk Assessments, as well as employee training gaps that might have contributed to an incident.

Digital Permit to Work solution

We expanded our suite of operational risk solutions, providing insight into operational safety across our customers’ organizations with the addition of the Digital Permit to Work solution. The Permit to Work (PTW) module supports the coordination of high-hazard activities, identifying potential hazards and ensuring that necessary controls and authorizations are in place, helping to ensure the safe execution of hazardous work activities for our customers. The PTW solution provides access to permits across all stages of the permit lifecycle.

By incorporating notifications and escalations, we are seeing permit clearance times reduced, as we help users to start and end work on schedule. In addition to automating and standardizing the permit process across the organization, the module also helps to ensure compliance by facilitating and documenting many procedures, isolations, requirement checklists, and authorizations. PTW is also able to create, assign, and manage action items through closure.

ProcessMAP also made enhancements to our mobile platform in 2020. Our customers identified key requirements at both the plant floor and leadership team levels, including the ability to access real-time and advanced analytics, data visualization dashboards, and other reports on mobile devices. Customers may now access Insight data analytics solution via tablets, which enables users with appropriate permissions to access actionable analytics and rich visualizations, including different dashboards and reports. Our new Risk Assessment app was designed to provide access to all approved risk assessments via mobile devices, right at the point of use on the plant floor. Users can quickly search for and retrieve required procedures to view tasks and hazards, as well as approved administrative and procedural controls and required PPE. The app allows users to email the assessments to others as needed.

The Audit Management app has received several updates over the course of the past year. Most impactful is the ability to conduct audits associated with employees or assets. These new features provide users additional flexibility to manage employee-based audits, and audits for contractors as well. Asset-based audits enable users to conduct inspections or audits for an asset class, such as all forklifts or all ladders, as well as for individual assets, which can help ensure that all assets or equipment are in a safe operating condition.

ProcessMAP has added numerous efficiencies to the Training Management solution. Employees can view upcoming, incomplete or overdue training courses, giving them a holistic view of their training status. Depending on their permissions, supervisors and managers can view their direct reports’ course-completion status, take attendance, or update the outcomes. This feature is very valuable when conducting in-person training. Supervisors can easily update training completions either one at a time or as a group.

We see our Low-Code/ no-code Application development Platform (LCAP) – Connected Workers Apps platform – as a key enabler in mobile transformation. Since 2018, when ProcessMAP first gave access to LCAP, it has grown far beyond our expectations, with 3000% growth in three years. Our customers are creating apps specific to their organizations, their industries, and their needs. Some of the most common apps are now part of our ready-to-use library. ProcessMAP also introduced Formula Builder, which allows users to create fields that can be auto calculated. Another feature allows for recurrence, which can be integrated with task management, custom data source management, with the record summary allowing for the creation of customized use of records and enhanced record level support, allowing customers to assign and control access to both records and specific fields. We expect use of App Builder will continue to grow over the next few years, with ProcessMAP continuing to invest in new features and functionalities to best support that anticipated growth and use.

For more detailed information on ProcessMAP’s 2020 innovations, please click here.