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Case Study: The Arkema Group |
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Download and read the full text of this case study.  (225k) The Company
The Arkema Group is one of the largest chemical companies in the world. With an employee roster of over 19,000 people and 90 facilities spread across three continents, Arkema’s annual sales total over 3 billion Euros. The company's size and global reach gives it an array of complex environmental data management challenges.
The Challenge
Prior to Arkema’s North American opsEnvironmental implementation, each of the company’s U.S. plants used its own home-grown system for environmental data management. As regulatory requirements increased, it became apparent that this approach was no longer sufficient. At the facility level, impending Title V permits were creating a new compliance burden for plants. At the corporate level, a need was emerging for a standardized, consistent and dependable method of data collection across the company - one which would ensure data integrity while decreasing the amount of time and money spent on corporate reporting. So in 2001, Arkema decided to purchase an environmental software solution for six of its North American facilities in order to streamline its compliance management at both the plant and corporate levels.
The Solution
The company did an exhaustive review of the commercially available software packages. The review pointed to opsEnvironmental because the software provided the functionality that plant environmental managers required, while also offering the strong enterprise orientation that corporate EHS staff needed. The company then set out implementing it in six of its U.S. facilities. Examples of the kinds of benefits the software has brought to Arkema include:
Time Savings on Emissions Inventories. Arkema's Beaumont facility is required to demonstrate compliance with both pounds per hour and rolling twelve-month total tons per year limits for all 6 EPA criteria pollutants. Emissions Inventories are prepared monthly to ensure that the plant is not exceeding the annual permissible total on any rolling 12-month basis. The process required significant staff resources. "Now," says Kevin Adams, Environmental Manager at the Beaumont plant, "there is only a small amount of hand-entered data; opsEnvironmental is configured to automatically pull everything else in."
Increased Compliance Visibility. With Title V permits looming on the horizon, the need for real-time compliance visibility was prime for facility environmental managers. Thanks to opsEnvironmental, plant managers will be able to produce compliance snapshots at any time. And data-triggered automated e-mail notifications will alert staff instantly when emissions thresholds are approached, so that necessary corrective actions can be taken before the situation escalates.
Streamlined Corporate Reporting. Before the opsEnvironmental implementation, data for corporate rollup reports was provided to Corporate HES in a variety of spreadsheets which had to be manually processed into a single report. Now, opsEnvironmental is configured to help Corporate HES staff prepare reports on a number of metrics, including Waste / Water summary reports, GHG reports, VOC summary reports, Annual HES cost reports, annual energy summary reports, and others. "Rollup data for eighteen sites is entered directly into the software," says Mike Prescott, Principle Environmental Engineer in Arkema’s Corporate HES department. "All the plant managers have access to the software's web data entry forms, and can easily add their data to the system, and it all gets funneled up into the appropriate categories."
With time-savings like these, Arkema environmental staff can now free up precious human resources to work on higher-value activities. That's money in the bank for Arkema.
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