Combat Green Skepticism with Accurate ESG Data

Greenwashing, or the presenting of misinformation to create a sustainable image, is common among organizations. While many consumers may not be aware with the term greenwashing, they are aware of how common it is. In fact, consumers are so aware of this trend that they’re overwhelmingly skeptical of all organizations presenting themselves as sustainable. Four out of every five consumers have expressed skepticism of organizations claiming to be sustainable. So, how does your company express your sincere desire to take steps that are sustainable for the environment? With accurate and transparent data.

Avoid Green Skepticism and Greenwashing with Locus

With 2/3 of consumers seeking out companies that emphasize sustainable practices, the temptation to greenwash is certainly enticing. Sometimes it comes in the form of making irrelevant claims, like saying a product is free of something that is banned (like CFCs). Other times it comes in the form of half-truths, like saying that a product is sustainably sourced, despite the manufacture of the product being unsustainable or harmful to the environment. Any way you look at it, the demand for sustainable products is so high, as is the temptation to greenwash. The truest, and least disputable way to combat greenwashing is by collecting and reporting your data accurately.

Sustainability is now a broad umbrella term that encompasses not only environmental practices, but social and corporate governance as well, better known as ESG. This broadness reflects a change in consumer attitudes from generation to generation, perceiving more than environmental practices as important while holding environmental practices to the microscope. In fact, over 75% of Gen X consumers say that they have to trust a brand before purchasing from them, and over 85% of Millennial and Gen Z consumers say they same. This trust encompasses everything from the use of organic ingredients to company wellness practices, and is reinforced with buying practices. To do environmental, social, and corporate governance right, organizations have taken a data-first approach.

Credible ESG Reporting with Locus

With Locus Technologies, you can take concrete steps towards achievable ESG goals. By taking a fully-digital approach, your organization can make the transformation by maintaining full visibility of raw sustainability data, calculations, and other factors, and also keeping data easily accessible and traceable. Reports are fully traceable back to the source, and are indisputable, allowing for increased trust from consumers or anyone else who has a stake in this information. Given that 7/10 consumers are willing to pay a premium to sustainable-minded companies who are fully transparent with their efforts, this move can provide a significant return on investment in the short term.

The benefits of data centralization also go beyond combatting greenwashing. A fully-digital and streamlined process will improve your ability to handle the data appropriately, and will ease any auditing and reporting responsibilities moving forward, making the entire process cheaper and faster.

Avoid Green Skepticism and Greenwashing with Locus

With brand loyalty and purchasing decisions being reliant on sustainable decisions, the move to accurate and transparent data management is key. By implementing Locus Technologies ESG software, your organization can employ cutting-edge solutions to combat greenwashing by promoting your sustainability goals and actions transparently and accurately.

 

No-Code Application Development

Locus delivers capabilities that enterprises need to achieve true digital transformation in a unified low-code or no-code automation platform. Locus provides out-of-the-box tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external applications, and provide a rich user experience.

No-Code EHS Application Development

Locus offers low-code app building, rich multi-experience capabilities, business process orchestration, automated decision making, and easy integration with other databases. Locus makes it easy to modify existing seeded apps or build entirely new apps in a few clicks and provides easy ways to write business logic to solve challenging EHS or ESG problems. We let you blend “off the shelf” apps and unique requirements with exceptional ease.

Who is a User-Developer?

If you know how to layout slides, if you can draw a flow chart, build a spreadsheet using formulae, sorting, with tables and charts, then you are a User Developer. We empower domain experts to build applications within the Locus Platform using the platform’s drag and drop functionality.

What is No-Code Development Platform Software?

No-code development platforms provide drag-and-drop tools that enable end-users with proper access privileges to develop software quickly without coding. Locus Platform provides WYSIWYG editors and drag-and-drop components to rapidly assemble and design EHS, ESG, or any other application applications. Both developers and non-developers can use these tools to practice rapid application development with customized workflows and functionality. Locus Platform provides tools for enterprise-sized businesses that need to quickly design business processes and workflow applications at a large scale, such as ESG reporting or EHS compliance management. The software tools provide templates for workflow, element libraries, and interface customization to create fully functioning applications without any coding.

With Locus, your organization can:

  • Drag-and-drop entities to assemble applications.
  • Allow non-developers and non-technical users to build applications.
  • Build ESG, EHS, or any other apps fast using visual tools that empower IT and business lines alike.
  • Leverage no-code integration to connect and act upon data across databases, cloud services, and legacy systems without data migration or use APIs to tie in data.
  • Deliver enterprise-grade security, scalability, and reliability to support mission-critical business apps.
  • Easily build complex workflows to suit your organizations needs.

More on Custom Apps.

Environmental Reports Tailored to Your Needs

Companies across a wide array of industries utilize Locus Environmental Information Management (EIM) software. Some examples include petroleum companies with over 6,000 sites, fracking companies with 3,000 plus sites, leading chemical corporations, engineering firms, private and public water utilities, DOE facilities, Native American tribes, aerospace companies, representatives of the electronics industry, and more. There is not a single report that these companies share in common, and as such, our approach to reporting recognizes our customers’ diversity.

DMR builder and report in EIM

Instead of focusing on canned reports, we provide users with the tools to build their own custom reports—enabling them to design exactly what they need, either independently or along with our stellar support team. To make the transition to Locus EIM as easy as possible, we ask our customers about their top reporting priorities. Then, we build reports to match their specifications during the implementation process to be up and running from day one. Not only does this facilitate the transition to our system, but it also gives our customers examples of how to build their custom reports.

 

Grid Reports

Before we delve into EIM’s formatted reports module, keep in mind that many of our customers’ reporting needs are met by EIM’s grids. For example, here is a sample grid populated with analytical results that match some previously chosen selection criteria:

Locus EIM Grids

One-click and this becomes an Excel spreadsheet (or any of a range of file formats) to which you can add a title, edit the column headers as needed, and if required, engage in further formatting.

Locus EIM Grid Report

 

Formatted Reports

Let’s now move on to EIM’s formatted reports module. Templates provide EIM with instructions concerning report layouts, content, and formatting. They do not address which records stored in EIM are to appear in the report. Template creation requires more in-depth knowledge of EIM and needs to be done only once for any given report format. Running a report is a more straightforward task. The same report can be re-run any number of times using different selection criteria. For example, it is not uncommon for a customer to print a monthly, quarterly, or even annual report using the same template. All that changes from one reporting period to the next is the selected sampling or measurement date range. Upon saving your entries, the report is ready to be used by others, unless designated as private.

To run a formatted report in EIM, all you need to know is what filters should be chosen to display only the relevant set of data. Aside from date ranges, what are examples of selection criteria available to you when executing a formatted report? For example, you can select individual locations or named location groups; individual or named groups of parameters; one or more sample types, sample purposes, samples, sampling programs, sampling events, or sample delivery groups; a range of sample depths; only filtered or unfiltered samples; only leached or not leached analyses; one or more EDDs; and one or more work order numbers to name a few.

Locus Formatted Reports

 

Expert SQL Query Reports

The expert query tool allows the user to retrieve records from many EIM data tables with a flexible interface, where join and column definitions are customized. The expert query output can be scheduled as an attachment to an email or run as needed, private or public, or saved on the dashboard for ultimate access by all user levels.

The EIM Expert Query Tool (EQT) lets users create their database queries using a drag-and-drop table interface. Users can also directly write T-SQL language requests to pull data from EIM. This powerful tool empowers the super users to take full advantage of the data managed in EIM and creates “custom reports” without the need for a developer.

Locus Expert SQL Query

 

Additional Reports

Additional reports include DMR reports (formatted and NetDMR); Self-monitoring; Regulatory formatted exports (various EPA regions); Consumer Confidence Reports; Data Validation (in association with the Data Validation Module); Coliform reports (Water configuration); custom DMR reports and custom MSGP reports; and a wide range of metric reports for usage statistics, records, sites, and management reports including holding table metrics, SDG turnaround times, reporting tool metrics, and LocusDocs metrics.

 

 

Emerging Technology and the Environmental Industry

Locus Founder and CEO, Neno Duplan recently sat down with Grant Ferrier of the Environmental Business International to discuss a myriad of topics relating to technology in the environmental industry such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Multi-tenancy, IoT, and much more.

Read more

Water Quality in the Cloud with Neno Duplan

Locus Technologies founder and CEO Neno Duplan provides a wealth of experience on water quality in the cloud. Neno began cloud-based data work before any of us knew what the cloud even was. He does a great job explaining the steps needed to undertake and the significant benefits of a cloud-based digital transformation, and much more!

Listen here.

Adapting to New ESG Roles and Responsibilities

A growth in commitment from proactive organizations towards heightened ESG standards means that many professionals have seen their duties not only increase, but they have been made more diverse than before.

Read more

Top 5 Usability Features in Locus EIM

Locus EIM is the leading cloud-based application for managing and reporting environmental data. We have highlighted 5 key usability features that allow users to get the most out of their investment.

Read more

5 Ways to Manage Your Hazardous Waste

The Locus Waste Management application enables EHS professionals to manage wastes across their entire enterprise and prepare reports with just one click.

Read more

Utilizing Wearable Tech for EHS 

In August 2014, we wrote on the potential use of wearables for EHS professionals. Less than a year later, the Apple Watch was introduced, revolutionizing the market. Now, wearables in the EHS space aren’t a hypothetical. Roughly a fifth to a quarter of Americans wear a smartwatch daily. Wearables are undoubtedly one of the biggest trends in EHS, with a seemingly endless number of uses to promote a more efficient and safer workplace.

Locus EHS Wearable Tech | Apple Watch

Despite recent growth, wearables are still in their infancy when it comes to EHS. Verdantix anticipates that companies will spend 800% more on connected worker devices in twenty years, an explosion in utilization. This year alone, over 20% of surveyed companies are reporting an increase in budget for wearables for EHS purposes. While demand from organizations is growing, most EHS software is yet to adapt to market needs, with few offering wearable support.

Locus is prepared to meet the needs of the market, by integrating wearable support with our mobile application. Here are a few ways to best utilize your smartwatch with Locus Mobile:

Smart notifications

Custom and priority notifications can be tailored to fit the needs of professionals in your organization, increasing engagement and response time.

Keep track of routine samples

Calendar alerts directly to your wearable, so that no samples are missed by field technicians.

Location tracking

Get alerted when you’re entering a safety zone that requires specific PPE.

Vital signs

Track worker vital signs for faster response time in the event of an emergency.

If your organization is looking to implement wearable tech, Locus product specialists are ready to discuss your needs and how we can help.

 

Quicker Data Searching with Natural Language Processing

The recent year of lockdowns pushed many daily activities into the virtual world. Work, school, commerce, the arts, and even medicine have moved online and into the cloud. As a result, considerably more resources and information are now available from an internet browser or from an application on a handheld device. To navigate through all this content and make sense of it, you need the ability to quickly search and get results that are most relevant to your needs.

You can think of the web as a big database in the cloud. Traditionally, database searches were done using a precise syntax with a standard set of keywords and rules, and it can be hard for non-specialists to perform such searches without learning programming languages. Instead, you want to search in as natural a matter as possible. For example, if you want to find pizza shops with 15 miles of your house that offer delivery, you don’t want to write some fancy statement like “return pizza_shop_name where (distance to pizza shop from my house < 15 miles) and (offers_delivery is true). You just want to type “what pizza shops within 15 miles of my house offer delivery?” How can this be done?

Search Engines

Enter the search engine. While online search engines appeared as early as 1990, it wasn’t until Yahoo! Search appeared in 1995 that their usage became widespread. Other engines such as Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves, and Excite soon followed, though not all of them survived. In 1998, Google hit the internet, and it is now the most dominant engine in use. Other popular engines today are Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo.

Current search engines compare your search terms to proprietary indexes of web page and their content. Algorithms are used to determine the most relevant parts of the search terms and how the results are ranked on the page. Your search success depends on what search terms you enter (and what terms you don’t enter). For example, it is better to search on ‘pizza nearby delivery’ than ‘what pizza shops that deliver are near my house’, as the first search uses less terms and thus more effectively narrows the results.

Search engines also support the use of symbols (such as hyphens, colons, quote marks) and commands (such as ‘related’, ‘site’, or ‘link’) that support advanced searches for finding exact word matches, excluding certain results, or limiting your search to certain sites. To expand on the pizza example, support you wanted to search for nearby pizza shops, but you don’t want to include Nogud Pizza Joints because they always put pineapple on your pizza. You would need to enter ‘pizza nearby delivery -nogud’. In some ways, with the need to know special syntax, searching is back where it was in the old database days!

Search engines are also a key part of ‘digital personal assistants’, or programs that not only perform searches but also perform simple tasks. An assistant on your phone might call the closest pizza shop so you can place an order, or perhaps even login to your loyalty app and place the order for you. There is a dizzying array of such assistants used within various devices and applications, and they all seem to have soothing names such as Siri, Alexa, Erica, and Bixby. Many of these assistants support voice activation, which just reinforces the need for natural searches. You don’t want to have to say “pizza nearby delivery minus nogud”! You just want to say “call the nearest pizza shop that does delivery, but don’t call Nogud Pizza”.

Search engine and digital personal assistant developers are working towards supporting such “natural” requests by implementing “natural language processing”. Using natural language processing, you can use full sentences with common words instead of having to remember keywords or symbols. It’s like having a conversation as opposed to doing programming. Natural language is more intuitive and can help users with poor search strategies to have more successful searches.

Furthermore, some engines and assistants have artificial intelligence (AI) built in to help guide the user if the search is not clear or if the results need further refinement. What if the closest pizza shop that does delivery is closed? Or what if a slightly farther pizza place is running a two-for-one special on your favorite pizza? The built-in AI could suggest choices to you based on your search parameters combined with your past pizza purchasing history, which would be available based on your phone call or credit charge history.

Searching in Locus EIM

The Locus team recently expanded the functionality of the EIM (Environmental Information Management) search bar to support different types of data searches. If a search term fits several search types, all are returned for the user to review.Locus EIM Quick Search

  • Functionality searches: entering a word that appears in a menu or function name will return any matching menu items and functions. For example, searching for ‘regulatory exports’ returns several menu items for creating, managing, and exporting regulatory datasets.
  • Help searches: entering a word or phrase that appears in the EIM help files will return any matching help pages. For example, ‘print a COC’ returns help pages with that exact phrase.
  • Data searches: entering a location, parameter, field parameter, or field sample will return any matching data records linked with that entity. For example, searching for the parameter ‘tritium’ returns linked pages showing parameter information and all field sample results for that parameter. Searching for the location ‘MW-1’ returns linked pages showing all field samples, groundwater levels, field measurements, and field sample results at the location.

EIM lets the user perform successful searches through various methods. In all searches, the user does not need to specify if the search term is a menu item, help page, or data entity such as parameter or location. Rather, the search bar determines the most relevant results based on the data currently in EIM. Furthermore, the search bar remembers what users searched for before, and then ranks the results based on that history. If a user always goes to a page of groundwater levels when searching for location ‘MW-1’, then that page will be returned first in the list of results. Also, the EIM search bar supports common synonyms. For example, searches for ‘plot’, ‘chart’, and ‘graph’ all return results for EIM’s charting package.

Locus EIM Chart Search

By implementing the assistance methods described above, Locus is working to make searching as easy as possible. As part of that effort, Locus is working to add natural language processing into EIM searches. The goal is to let users conduct searches such as ‘what wells at my site have benzene exceedances’ or perform tasks such as ‘make a chart of benzene results’ without having to know special commands or query languages.’

How would this be done? Let’s set aside for now the issues of speech recognition – sadly, you won’t be talking to EIM soon! Assume your search query is ‘what is the maximum lead result for well 1A?’

  • First, EIM extracts key terms and modifiers (this is called entity recognition). EIM would extract ‘maximum’, ‘lead’, ‘result’, ‘well’, and ‘1A’, while ignoring connecting words such as ‘the’ or ‘for’.
  • Then, EIM categorizes these terms. EIM would be ‘trained’ via AI to know ‘lead’ is mostly used in environmental data as a noun for the chemical parameter, and not a verb. ‘Result’ refers to a lab result, and ‘well’ is a standard sampling location type.
  • EIM then runs a simple query and gets the maximum lead result for location 1A.
  • Finally, EIM puts the answer into a sentence (‘The maximum lead result at location 1A is 300 mg/L on 1/1/2020’) with any other information deemed useful, such as the units and the date.

A similar process could be done for tasks such as ‘make a chart of xylene results’. In this case, however, there is too much ambiguity to proceed, so EIM would need to return queries for additional clarifications to help guide the user to the desired result. Should the chart show all dates, or just a certain date range? How are non-detects handled? Which locations should be shown on the chart? What if the database stores separate results for o-Xylene, m,p-Xylene, plus Xylene (total)? Once all questions were answered, EIM could generate a chart and return it to the user.

Locus EIM Search Results

Natural language is the key to helping users construct effective searches for data, whether in EIM, on a phone, or in the internet. Locus continues to improve EIM by bringing natural language processing to the EIM search engine.

 

 

About the Author—Dr. Todd Pierce, Locus Technologies

Dr. Pierce manages a team of programmers tasked with development and implementation of Locus’ EIM application, which lets users manage their environmental data in the cloud using Software-as-a-Service technology. Dr. Pierce is also directly responsible for research and development of Locus’ GIS (geographic information systems) and visualization tools for mapping analytical and subsurface data. Dr. Pierce earned his GIS Professional (GISP) certification in 2010.