With an increased focus on EHS solutions, there is a key role for EHS technology in driving the development of a safety culture. In the recent webinar with independent research firm, Verdantix and Origami Risk, they dove deeper into the role of digitization as well as investment and adoption trends. The webinar was co-presented by Sean Salvas, Sr. Market Strategy Lead - EHS at Origami and Yaowen Ma, Principal Analyst of Verdantix.

What is Digital Transformation?

Sean kicked off the presentation defining digital transformation as “Adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes.” Organizations may choose to digitize for a variety of reasons, including:

• Better management of data
• Ensuring regulatory compliance
• Breaking away from paper and spreadsheets
• Better understanding risks
• Better trending and reporting

Types of Digital Transformation

Next, the presentation dove into the types of digital transformation that may occur:

• Process Transformation, for example, automating back-office processes to lower costs
• Business Model Transformation, for example, using data and analytics to redefine the car insurance business model with pay-per-mile
• Domain Transformation, unlocking new revenue opportunities to enter new markets and functions with technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and machine learning
• Safety/Culture Transformation, for example, leveraging technology to encourage employees to move to agile workflows, innovation, decentralized decision making, or a more proactive safety culture

Examples of EHS Technologies

A whole slew of technologies can be leveraged to support digital transformation. Those especially applicable to safety leaders include:

• Enterprise wide views and management system frameworks
• Communication tools
• Virtual assessment tools
• Advanced reporting and predictive/prescriptive analytics
• Intuitive and easy to use mobile apps
• Industrial wearables and connected worker solutions

EHS Digital Investment and Adoption Trends

Yaowen next highlighted industry data on digital adoption trends, with the vast majority of EHS safety leaders surveyed either actively implementing a digitization strategy or developing a digitization strategy.

Source: Verdantix, Global Corporate Survey 2020: EHS Budgets, Priorities & Tech Preferences, November 2020

He went on to highlight that not only are EHS investments growing at 10% annually across the world (Verdantix, Market Size And Forecast: EHS Software 2020-2025 (Global), March 2020), but that the key investments for EHS software are in:

• Incident management
• Safety Hazards & Risk Mitigation
• Occupational Health, Mental Health, and Wellbeing monitoring

Furthermore, Yaowen emphasized the trend toward mobile adoption, with nearly half of safety leaders indicating that they plan to increase spend on mobile technology.

How Can Digital Transformation Impact Your Organization?

Digital transformation can help organizations drive performance in a variety of ways:

• Move from ad hoc, disparate systems (manual processes such as spreadsheets and paper) to manage safety data and programs with little process to optimized processes to break down silos and consolidate data. 
• Support organizational improvements, such as proactive risk control, workflow automation and standardization, consistent recordkeeping and auditability of data, increased ease of data capture, better investigations, and performance analysis and benchmarking to KPIs
• Drive business outcomes, including time savings, improved accuracy and data quality, proactive safety culture, avoidance of fines and lower insurance premiums, and higher asset uptime
• Move forward in their culture of safety as illustrated in the chart below

Additional examples of the impact of digital EHS technology include:

• Increased brand reputation
• Focus on proactive and predictive (leading indicators) instead of reactive (lagging indicators)
• Better transparency, visibility, and accountability
• Integrated systems

Click here to watch the webinar in its entirety. 

How Origami Can Help 

Origami’s EHS Suite can help you move along in your digital transformation journey and advance your safety culture with pre-configured:

• Audit, inspection, and behavior-based safety (BBS) observation checklists based on industry best practices and OSHA standards
• Incident management and investigations, including root cause analysis (RCA)
• Dashboards and Reporting
• Job Safety Analysis (JSA)
• Safety Meetings

The Origami platform is built on an integrated cloud-based platform accessible via web and mobile. To learn more about our EHS suite, watch the overview video or get in touch.