Are You Ready for Reporting Season Blog

A Step-By-Step Guide to Utilizing an EHS&S Management System for a Stress-Free Reporting Season

December 3, 2024

By: Daniel McDermott

Ease the reporting burden with an EHS&S management system 

Greenhouse gas (GHG) and state emissions inventory reporting season is stressful for many EHS professionals, who often take on most, if not all, of the heavy lifting. Concentrating responsibility on Environmental Managers can lead to time-crunched and frenzied processes—but there’s another way. This blog shares best practices for harnessing efficiencies during reporting seasons and how an environment, health, safety, and sustainability (EHS&S) information management system (EMIS) can spread responsibility across your organization, transforming reporting into a seamless operation. 

Step 1: Start early

While reporting season kicks off in earnest in January or February, preparation should begin as early as possible. As the following steps demonstrate, looking ahead and managing reporting as an ongoing endeavor distributes the workload across the year and paves the road for an organized, accurate process in the spring. 

Step 2: Check for regulatory and reporting updates 

Ensuring your reporting plan aligns with regulatory and process updates is critical, and an environmental management system is essential for navigating these changes efficiently. 

Regulatory updates, typically released at the beginning of the year, can significantly impact data collection, the applicability of certain emission sources, and emission calculation methods. By promptly integrating these updates into your EMIS, you streamline data management and ensure your operations personnel are informed of new requirements, minimizing compliance risks.    

Similarly, changes to report formats – often available in late December – affect how data integrates into submission-ready reports. For example, the EPA recently released a draft of the new Subpart W spreadsheet format and XML schema for submitting 2024 emissions reports. An EMIS offers a centralized, automated approach that saves time and prevents last-minute errors. Developing a governance program built around managing changes within an EMIS ensures consistency and accuracy, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual corrections or disparate approaches to accommodate changes.

After you have reviewed the changes, compare your latest reporting tool (e.g., your eGGRT reporting spreadsheet) to the previous year’s and identify any updates in the formatting or content. You can then compile the changes into a new spreadsheet, compare the new XML reporting schema to the previous years’, and implement updates. 

Step 3: Review changes to your business

Employee turnover, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures are business realities that will impact your reporting requirements to varying degrees each year. Updating asset status changes as soon as they occur, whether this entails updating your entire EMIS or simply updating procedures, will streamline your reporting process during the springtime crunch by clarifying the sources for which you must collect data, as well as from whom you must collect that data.

Step 4: EHS&S management systems disperse responsibility with centralized data

The burden of data collection during reporting season often falls disproportionately on EHS professionals, creating bottlenecks and underutilizing their expertise. An environmental management system enables a collaborative and centralized approach that engages operations personnel in the data collection process. With their on-the-ground familiarity with equipment and processes, operations teams are uniquely positioned to collect and input accurate data, reducing inefficiencies and spreading responsibilities more equitably.    

Centralizing data collection within an EMIS transforms how organizations manage reporting. It creates a single source of truth for data review, analysis, and validation, eliminating the fragmented systems and miscommunications that arise from ad-hoc methods like email chains or multiple spreadsheets. Centralized systems reduce the risk of data loss and streamline the validation process, allowing EHS managers to focus on higher-level quality assurance rather than manual data entry.   

To mobilize operations effectively for centralized data management, consider these EMIS strategies: 

  1. Direct Data Entry by Operations: By enabling operations personnel to input data directly into an EMIS, organizations leverage the expertise of those closest to the data, enhancing its initial accuracy. EHS teams can then validate and analyze the consolidated data through the EMIS, ensuring compliance and consistency.      
  2. Integration with Data Historians: Connecting your EMIS with upstream data historians ensures that real-time measurements flow directly into the system, reducing manual input and errors. This integration supports faster and more accurate reporting.         

Step 5: Validate and submit reports

With more data management responsibility shifted to operations personnel, EHS managers can focus on validating data accuracy. Centralized data ensures EHS managers include all relevant sites in the validation process, reducing effort and expediting the identification of outliers. An EMIS may assist in this process by highlighting missing data or other outliers before submission – similar to how tax software suggests double-checking values for accuracy. 

Robust report validation is critical before uploading reporting spreadsheets to agency online submission systems. These systems often reject uploads due to invalid picklist options or inaccurate data, using logic and statistical checks against similar facilities and algorithm checks – for example, verifying whether quarterly data adds up to the annual total. 

Step 6: Jumpstart next year’s process

Reporting is an ongoing endeavor – the job isn’t done when your annual submissions are complete. By taking a couple of proactive steps, you can jumpstart a smooth reporting process for next year: 

  • Integrate current procedures, roles/responsibilities, and work practices into your environmental management system and seize opportunities to streamline your process.  
  • Update your data collection procedure or take advantage of any new features you may have yet to be aware of in your EMIS. 

Spreadsheets may seem convenient for managing environmental reporting, but they can create bottlenecks, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies long after submissions are complete. EHS&S management systems offer a more innovative solution by automating critical processes and centralizing data management. Unlike spreadsheets, an EMIS integrates roles, responsibilities, and procedures, ensuring that your team can collaborate effectively and efficiently by accessing facility-wide knowledge. By updating your data collection processes and leveraging EMIS features, you can eliminate redundancies, empower your team, and set the stage for accurate and stress-free reporting year after year. 

Set yourself up for a smooth reporting season now! 

At Montrose Environmental Group, we specialize in helping companies implement EMIS that streamlines data management and reporting. Our EHSS Management Information Solutions simplify complex processes, integrate real-time data, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations. We provide tailored solutions that meet your unique operational needs, from system design and configuration to integration with existing data platforms. Our expertise includes data automation, software deployment, and training programs that empower your team to leverage EMIS tools effectively. Let us partner with you to transform your reporting process, eliminate inefficiencies, and build a resilient foundation for ongoing environmental compliance and sustainability.   

Contact us today for a stress-free reporting season!