Natural Power: Adopting a Modern EHS Platform to Enable Comprehensive Risk Reporting
Natural Power is a global service provider and independent consultant for green energy projects. Since 1995, the company’s expert teams have provided advice on more than 6,000 projects to help create a world powered by renewable energy. The company provides services related to onshore wind, offshore renewables, solar, hydro, renewable heat and infrastructure. Its clients look to Natural Power for analysis, engineering, planning and permitting, environmental project management and due-diligence services.
The compliance challenge
Natural Power is a multidisciplinary company whose work involves frequent working offline and in isolation in remote environments.
As its customer base grew, it was clear that the company’s initial method of using spreadsheets, Word documentation and an outdated incident management system was not providing a unified view of environmental, health and safety (EHS) performance and risks across the organization. Among the challenges the company faced were:
- Limited transparency making oversight difficult
- Limited organization-wide accessibility to software tools, that made it difficult to improve risk cultures and develop effective governance
- Lack of integration with multiple key systems, leading to unnecessary administrative hours
- Limited integrated reporting, which made delivery of the risk governance framework inefficient
Ultimately, this limited, clunky and isolated system did not provide the modern risk governance framework suitable for a fast-growing company that would properly mitigate risks at all levels of the organization. Risk was measured differently in different areas, leading to an incomplete understanding of liabilities.
The solution
The company partnered with SAI360 to implement a dedicated EHS and Operational Risk Management platform that enables team members at all levels of the organization to understand risks, report them through a readily accessible mobile platform and manage related actions as part of a larger risk management framework that encourages organization-wide change.
Natural Power chose to roll out four SAI360 EHS&S modules: Audit Management, Behavioral Based Safety, Incident Management and Risk Management.
- Audit Management: Enables audit planning and follow-up through out-of-the-box reports and notifications.
- Behavioral Based Safety: Proactive preventative-based safety reporting
- Incident Management: A central platform provides a single source of truth for recording and responding to a wide variety of incidents and events.
- Risk Management: Aligns the risk process with established standards through tools including a risk register, risk bowtie, risk appetite and key risk indicators.
The results
Natural Power achieved simple, real-time capture of observations and incidents through mobile reporting. The company now utilizes a centralized information management approach that offers multiple ways to view and leverage information within a single platform, streamlining workflows and reducing time spent collecting and compiling key risk data from multiple sources.
The implementation of the new platform benefited from SAI360’s FastStart implementation service, which allowed Natural Power to hit the ground running with easy configuration, transparent costs and quick-start user training. The SAI360 implementation methodology resulted in rapid ROI and swift adoption of best-in-class risk and safety modules.
With SAI360 EHS&S, Natural Power has seen improvements in increased volume of risk information submitted, especially from field teams. The new system captured 46.5% more incidents and 42.5% more observations over corresponding five-month periods
from 2019 to 2021.
– Bethany Butler, HSEQ Administrator, Natural Power
