The State Of The EHS Software Market In 2021

An Accelerating Evolution of EHS Software market

Over the last 5 to 6 years, the EHS software market landscape has evolved rapidly. This rapid evolution was caused and accelerated, in part if not whole, by a confluence of emerging technological developments and the growing realization within organizations that their EHS teams are a strategic enabler for commercial growth, operational continuity, and investor confidence. With the advent of the global health and safety crisis in 2020, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the spotlight was on EHS teams in almost every organization, irrespective of their size, industry vertical, or overall risk profile. EHS leaders took the central command to steer their respective companies through the rapidly evolving crisis and lay the groundwork for a safe return-to-work policy for employees, contractors, and sub-contractors. The key ammunition in the arsenal of these EHS leaders was the access to ACT – Accurate, Complete, and Timely – health and safety data, and real-time and advanced analytics offered by a centralized and integrated EHS software platform.

Verdantix – a highly reputed and independent research, advisory, and analyst firm for the EHS, ORM, and ESG software industries – published its latest edition of the biennial Green Quadrant EHS Software 2021 report¹ in January of this year. The report highlights some of the macro trends in the EHS software space and it evaluated 22 suppliers of EHS software based on a 332-point questionnaire, three-hour demos of the platforms, and interviews of end-customers using these EHS solutions. To underscore the sustained growth in enterprises investing in EHS software, Verdantix estimates² the overall EHS software market to hit the $1.5B mark in 2021 and grow at a healthy CAGR of 11.5% for the next five years to become a $2.5B market by 2026. The COVID-19 pandemic has helped to accelerate the adoption of digital EHS solutions. According to a separate Verdantix survey³ of 300+ corporate EHS leaders, 36% of the respondents cited COVID-19 as having accelerated the digital transformation of their EHS initiatives. More than 80% confirmed that digital transformation of EHS function will continue to be a high or moderate priority, in 2021.

Cloud Deployment and Mobile EHS Apps – The New Default

According to the Verdantix report, all EHS software providers now support cloud deployment of their solutions. While a handful of legacy players still support on-premise deployments, this outdated mode of software deployment is in the final stages of going obsolete. ProcessMAP is one of the earliest adopters of the cloud/ SaaS model and has offered customers a 100% multi-tenant cloud infrastructure since the day the company was founded in the year 2000. This helped us to offer and upgrade our customers to the latest code base every year for free. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our customers remains substantially lower than on-premise installations.

Similarly, mobile EHS apps have become a default in today’s hyper-connected workplace. According to the Verdantix report, “All but two vendors also offer native mobile EHS apps with varied functionality accessible on iOS and Android platforms.”

ProcessMAP was one of the earliest to offer mobile EHS apps that were natively developed for the iOS and Android platforms. Native apps allow customers to use the biometric authentication features of their mobile devices (fingerprint or facial recognition), access the microphone and camera of the phones, provided that a user permits the app to access these capabilities and a whole list of additional advantages over web-apps.

EHS Training – A Key Pillar of Safety and a Frontier for Differentiation

The Verdantix report highlights how EHS training content and support has become a key differentiator in the crowded EHS software solutions space. This underpins a larger trend, in the EHS space, of companies focusing on leading indicators – like employee preparedness, behavior-based safety, near-miss incidents, proactive audits and inspections, etc. – to materially impact lagging safety indicators, such as TRIR, LTIR, etc.

ProcessMAP has partnered with Vivid Learning Systems to offer a comprehensive Learning Management System (LMS) that helps EHS supervisors to assign training courses to specific stakeholders, track and monitor their progress and completion status, and proactively ensure employees are adequately trained to identify potential hazards and risks before an injury or accident occurs. ProcessMAP’s LMS solution is also available on mobile devices, which has been a game-changer because employees are no longer tethered to a computer terminal to complete their training courses.

Robust Customer Success – A Hallmark of Long-term Partnership

While the EHS software market is crowded with several large and small suppliers, there is one critical lens that helps differentiate long-term, strategic digital transformation partners from run-of-the-mill software providers. That lens happens to be a robust customer success function at the vendor’s end. Of the 22 vendors evaluated by Verdantix, more than one-third had less than 15% of their full-time employees dedicated to customer success and service roles.

Why does it matter, you ask? Well, because a dedicated customer success team that believes in going the extra mile to help customers succeed in achieving their EHS objectives is a critical component of unlocking the value of an enterprise’s investment in an integrated EHS platform.

ProcessMAP’s customers have a dedicated customer success team that’s always ready to go above and beyond what’s required of them. With the onset of COVID-19, we doubled down on our regular engagement with customers to ensure they are adequately equipped to respond to the health and safety challenges within their respective organizations. This also translated to ProcessMAP releasing a comprehensive suite of COVID-19 management solutions within the first three weeks of the pandemic impacting customer operations.

Highlighting this commitment to our customers, the Green Quadrant EHS Software 2021 report states, “ProcessMAP responded rapidly during 2020 to develop a suite of solutions for pandemic response management and business continuity planning. Users of ProcessMAP’s COVID-19 solutions include Harley-Davidson for employee wellness checks, MAU Workforce Solutions for mobile app-based employee symptom tracking, and Smiths Group for COVID-19 incident reporting. DURA Automotive Systems has already used ProcessMAP to deliver approximately 10,000 employee COVID-19 health risk assessments.”

Convergence of Employee Safety and Asset Risk Management

The Verdantix report states that “Software designed to track incidents has traditionally captured historic data to help safety managers meet compliance reporting obligations against regulations such as OSHA Form 300A. The new paradigm for operational excellence focuses on real-time risk management for both assets and workers. Being able to intervene before equipment fails or a worker is injured is significantly more valuable than the ability to report on the incident after it has occurred.”

ProcessMAP’s Asset Risk Management (ARM) solution builds on this premise to provide a strategic approach to managing assets and the risks associated with them. Through our ARM solution, organizations can easily gauge the health of organizational assets, including the ability to easily track assets and their status, manage asset inspections and associated non-conformances and CAPAs, and identify use or association with permitted high-risk activities.

To learn more about ProcessMAP’s product innovations and enhancements in 2020, access the e-book here!