Since a long time, industrial transformation has created operational and business risks that EHS should address and play a key role. Presenting a once-in-a-time career opportunity for EHS business leaders to transform (since COVID), proactive and coordinated approaches, especially in digital technologies are creating step-change improvement in industrial operations.

Resilience is a key trait that becomes important for industrial profitability – though things tumbled a bit at start, success is now taking a renewed strategic focus. While looking closely at the bottom-line health, ease of use and ease of business is now thinkable with digital approaches.

The ‘next normal’ established during the pandemic is now aiming to accelerate the footprints of ‘software as a service’, giving growth to remote working scenarios and rapid deployment of digital solutions. The use of big data and analytics has always been on a steady growth trajectory – then COVID-19 happened and made the need for data even greater.

Definitely, the need for data to make all business decisions has grown, and this year, we have seen data analytics being used in real time for critical business and life-saving decisions. One is certain that it won’t stop from here.

Companies and institutions like John Hopkins and SAS created COVID-19 health dashboards that compiled data from various sources to help governments and citizens.

All of these platforms help in data-driven decisions and make the efforts transparent to gain foresight. As the boundaries between work and leisure time are disappearing, by streamlined core processes, we help deliver the rapid innovation (as safety solution providers) that any industry aims.

Here we present 3 reasons to validate that in today’s times, industries are ready to significantly accelerate initiatives and digitally transform their EHS business functions –

1. Health and Safety is more than just a ‘department’

The pandemic has stressed on the basic tenet of the digital transformation – that optimization becomes seamless through collaboration and connectivity. Predictive and prescriptive risk management holds importance because of the increased safety awareness. Today, inadequate alignment and integration of health and safety initiatives with core business operations can render results that are dangerous and at times, life threatening.

2. Going digital is in alignment with operational excellence

More than meeting regulatory compliances, the dramatic uptick in the use of digital technologies in EHS has helped safeguard customer and employee health and well-being. Given the dynamics of the pandemic, ‘slow and steady’ did not work at start – in contrast, extraordinary speed and vigor with scalable and carefully planned approaches sustained. Digitally mature companies provide their employees with greater autonomy in decision-making, increasing speed and agility.

For industries, all of this can be distilled into three separate value propositions that they should be willing to offer in health and safety – speed, scale and convenience.

3. Digitization orchestrates a stronger recovery

In two different attitudes among companies adapting to the current disruption – some are using this time to plan their place in the “next normal”, others are treading water, waiting for the world to go back to what it was. A Deloitte report states that 75% of the company CEOs indicate significant opportunities in this crisis.

Which provides EHS an excellent opportunity to collaborate. Not to mention, inherent in these programs are cross-functional collaboration and integrated approaches to improvement that considers teams and processes first, and technology as an enabler.

As EHS domain experts, we would suggest that no matter the state of digital readiness you are in the organization, you should have a digital game plan which may include shoring up your foundation – effective management system or an enabling software platform.