On 8-9 November 2016, Anthesis Group's team in Germany attended the Verdantix Summit in Amsterdam. Here are their key takeaways from the summit.

The summit last week focused on sharing best practice in – and getting the most value from – Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) information. It brought together EHS professionals from diverse industries across Europe and further afield to identify and share insights on how to combine EHS and IT systems for superior performance.

At Anthesis, our EHS consultants are strongly supported by our in-house software and systems team, enabling us to bring the understanding of EHS and software together. At the summit, the connection of EHS management and technology was at the center of the discussion. Here are my three key insights from the summit:

1. Understanding and simplicity is key.

The understanding between the software systems and EHS communities needs to be improved. In an ever-evolving world with increasingly high technological demands on products and services, it’s time to strive to integrate. By bringing together these two disciplines, we can realize untapped potentials and improve efficiencies such as instant reporting and data availability. However, for success, these integrated solutions need to be simple, applicable, and implemented appropriately.

2. A strong business case is necessary.

Technology is considered to have a major role in the future for EHS to support transparency and risk mitigation. The specific technologies however must be relevant to the particular industry and business being considered, as all businesses are at a different stage in their EHS journey. It’s important to be able to present the business case in a visible and measurable way so that a return on investment can be seen by management. Considerations of both leading and lagging indicators could add weight to technology-fueled EHS initiatives.

3. Bring EHS under the banner of ‘sustainability’.

EHS should be seen as an integral part of sustainability, as metrics within the sustainability space cover environmental, social and governmental aspects. ‘Social’ can be considered to include aspects within the health and safety remit. By integrating approaches, there’s greater strength and depth to drive forward initiatives and improvements. Understanding the integration of these areas will, however, need to find its way into the sustainability and EHS departments of globally-active companies to get the value it deserves.

Along with these key insights, a number of global trends were discussed as very relevant for the industry. Among them was the value of technology such as mobile apps, drones and wearables in supporting EHS topics. And, similarly to the insights above, the conclusion is that technologies such as these can be incredibly helpful – as long as they’re applicable, simple, and have a strong business case behind them for your business.

The Verdantix summit was a great opportunity not just to learn about new developments and recent trends, but also to put heads together with other EHS professionals to debate the challenges, and discuss the solutions, around integrating EHS and technology.

We’re already looking forward to the next Verdantix summit in 2017. Hope we’ll see you there!

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