Environmental Calculations Designed by Data Quality Experts

Scientific calculations are an essential aspect of many fields of study, including physics, chemistry, and engineering including environmental engineering. These calculations involve complex formulas and equations that are often too time-consuming and challenging to solve by hand. Fortunately, programming languages and software have made it easier for scientists and researchers to carry out scientific calculations quickly and accurately. Software plays a vital role in environmental calculations, as it provides scientists and researchers with a powerful tool for analyzing and interpreting complex data related to the environment. Environmental engineers need to deal with vast amounts of data that must be analyzed to draw meaningful conclusions. The environmental field encompasses a wide range of disciplines, including climate science, ecology, and environmental engineering, and each of these areas requires specific types of calculations that can be performed more efficiently and accurately using computers.

In recent years, many programming languages have been developed that are specifically designed for scientific computing. These languages, such as MATLAB, Python, and R, are powerful tools for numerical analysis and data visualization. However, programming for environmental calculations poses some challenges. One of the primary challenges is ensuring that the code is accurate and reliable. Even small errors in the code can lead to significant errors in the results, which can have serious consequences for environmental decision-making.

Collections of environmental data in an enterprise pose another set of challenges, including gathering data from all business units and ensuring the accuracy, accessibility, interoperability, and privacy of data. Addressing these challenges requires careful planning, collaboration, and the adoption of standardized data formats and protocols.

Software applications developed at Locus like Environmental Information Management (EIM), Greenhouse Gas, Air Emissions and Sustainability address these challenges by offering tailored solutions for environmental scientists. One of the key advantages of using these applications is that it allows scientists to automate many of the tedious and time-consuming tasks involved in data collection, scientific calculations, analysis, and regulatory reporting. These applications have gone through extensive testing ensuring accurate and reliable results and the automation can make regulatory reporting a breeze when time is of the essence.

In conclusion, scientific calculations are an essential aspect of environmental engineering, and Locus offers powerful tools for performing these calculations quickly and accurately. By using Locus software, scientists and researchers can automate tedious tasks, process large datasets, and extract valuable insights from the environmental data of the organization.

 

 

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Foster Farms Selects Locus Technologies EHS/ESG Enterprise SaaS

Locus EHS/ESG Cloud will streamline Foster Farms EHS Compliance, ESG Reporting, and Water Quality Management.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 2, 2023 — Locus Technologies, the leading EHS Compliance and ESG software provider, today announced that Foster Farms, a top US provider of fresh, frozen, and prepared poultry products and the leading brand of fresh chicken in the Western U.S., selected Locus’s award-winning enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) to organize and manage their EHS compliance and ESG reporting.

Foster Farm subscribed to an integrated set of apps offered in the Locus Cloud Platform. Some apps include EHS Compliance Management, ESG and Sustainability, GHG Emission Factor and Calculation Management, Inspections, Configuration Workbench, Air Emissions Management, Storm Water, Wastewater, and well data management and reporting.

Locus Cloud is the first fully integrated multitenant platform created from the ground up to allow organizations to manage their environmental, energy, water, waste, carbon, air, health and safety, remediation, water quality, and compliance information in one place. The Locus Platform allows companies to configure their own management, tracking, visualization, and reporting through a graphically driven user interface. This feature enables organizations to configure the software to their needs without worrying about the expensive programming outlays usually associated with customization and single-tenant deployments.

When designing integrated EHS/ESG SaaS, Locus sought to make the complicated workflow and management of environmental data as simple as possible and to make it manageable from a single platform with shared components. The resulting platform offers immense flexibility and endless capabilities with minimal training thanks to the new, intuitive, user-friendly interface design.

“The accurate tracking and reporting of critical environmental resource usage is a necessary part of our compliance responsibilities, and a major component of our efforts to ensure that we are a sustainable producer. The Locus application software will make a significant contribution to our resource management capabilities,” said Don Hill, Foster Farms Director of Environmental Affairs.

“We are delighted that Foster Farms recognized the power of the Locus Cloud platform. Businesses do not want to shop for point solutions from different vendors only to be left with the nightmare of integration, security, synchronization, and vendor management. They want one-stop shops and to avoid having to deal with vendors that don’t integrate well with one another or have spotty service and limited support. Locus will provide Foster Farms single platform through which they can accomplish all their environmental and compliance management needs on a single, fully customer-configurable platform,” said Neno Duplan, President, and CEO of Locus. “Keeping the end user’s perspective in mind, we’ve packed the same 26-plus years of domain expertise that Locus has been offering all along into a highly configurable and scalable software platform built from the ground up on the latest web technologies,” remarked Duplan.

ABOUT FOSTER FARMS

Foster Farms is dedicated to providing families across America with great food. From ready to cook chicken and turkey, to chicken nuggets and corndogs, Foster Farms portfolio of fresh, frozen, and prepared foods, are always welcome whether it’s dinner time or snack time. Since its founding in 1939 Foster Farms has gone on to become one of the largest quality poultry producers in the United States. Headquartered in Livingston, Ca with facilities in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana, the company has nearly 12,000 Team Members, and is committed to building a “culture that nobody wants to walk aways from.”

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EIM Search Tool – Vlog

Locus Technologies’ customizable software makes scheduling and collecting routine water samples is made easy by using Locus Mobile and EIM.

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Finding the Best Environmental Sampling Tool

There is a need for most water entities to centralize data, and more easily load, share, analyze, and report data. Locus Technologies’ customizable software makes scheduling and collecting routine water samples is made easy by using Locus Mobile and EIM. Below is a list of frequent challenges that customers have encountered during their water sampling process and how they can be solved using the right tools from Locus. or better communications. 

Challenge 1: Finding a flexible sampling planning tool 

Planning tools need to allow flexibility in terms of different sampling intervals and date ranges, different field and analytical parameters, and account for location grouping. Using a well-designed application can pull together all of this detailed information and can provide a summary view of the individual samples. A manager can easily view sample status, and whether the sample is complete, in process, or planned.  A well-designed application can also generate the chain of custody (COC), and lab and sample shipping date information and labels per sample, which is a huge time saver. This type of sample tracking detail seemed to be very useful to many conference attendees to help ensure they are in regulatory compliance with required sampling frequencies. A key feature to look for is an application that is flexible enough that it can allow one-time, unplanned sample events such as water main breaks, customer complaints and schedule changes, and can handle complex multi-year routine sampling with ease. As a plus, it’s easy for you or your manager to know where you stand at any time. 

LocusPlatform_Water_Sampling

Challenge 2: Eliminating data entry errors caused by hand data entry 

Data entry errors and fixing bad data when it was transcribed from field notes to Excel or other programs is a persistent problem with the old way of doing things.  Your company needs a better way to streamline the error prone data collection process.  Many clients are interested in an alternative to the pencil/paper/clipboard method and had goals to move to tablet or smartphone for data collection.  The universal wish list for mobile field applications included: 

  • Easy to use and set up 
  • Built in data validation to catch data entry errors at the source 
  • Direct upload to a data system so the end of the day all the daily samples were in the system with the push of a button 
  • Prepopulating locations especially for large water systems 
  • Complete field instructions for samplers on what to collect and where to collect it to eliminate missed samples 
  • Smart tracking to know on a daily/weekly basis, what samples were collected and what samples were still outstanding 
  • Integrated with sample planning tools (See challenge 1) to automate the sampling instructions and track the data collection activities vs plan 

Locus-Mobile-Water-Sampling

Challenge 3: Getting the most out of their software, especially regarding updates 

Everyone is aware that software updates all the time.  Sometimes its security enhancements and sometime feature enhancements or bug fixes.  A source of frustration is getting a software update and not knowing what was updated or how best to incorporate a new feature/enhancement into their established process.  There was also concern for impact to an established routine with field crews that were used to the existing way of doing things. Even if a functionality improved the workflow, enhancements are only valuable to a user if they understand how to use them and how to incorporate them into their existing process. 

Some suggestions from the attendees included:
  • Concurrent documentation updates with software updates 
  • “Quick start” guides for new functionality 
  • Online training on the new functionality with recording for later viewing 
  • Heads up on what is coming in the next several months so they can do strategic planning (sharing the roadmap) 
  • Sandbox environment to test the enhancements before going in production so they can plan how to incorporate the features into their process and train field crews 

Mobile applications, which appear very simple to the users, are in reality complex software and require careful integration with the receiving database for a range of complex use cases.  This makes rolling out new mobile features challenging for both the developers and the users.  Enhanced customer/developer communication along with a sandbox environment can go a long way towards solving some of the inherent issues with rapid innovations and updates associated with cloud and mobile software. 

Locus-Technologies-Training-and-Support

Software tools are available and can solve a lot of the common data management challenges, but know what you want, know the problem you are trying to solve and know it will take some time and effort, but the end result will significantly improve your business processes. Though these challenges are present when choosing a software, Locus Technologies has the experts to help you hurdle the challenges to find the solution that is best for your business.