Almost anybody whose work involves some aspect of environmental health can benefit from adopting anenvironmental database management system. An EDMS takes automation to the next level, providing a broad range of benefits that allow you to make the most of current technology. You can save time and cut costs, significantly improve both internal and external collaboration, produce better results and complete your work faster.
But that’s not all. Especially if you’re responsible for overall project organization and oversight or you’re primarily responsible for analyzing data or making final decisions about remediation solutions, an EDMS offers significant benefits beyond the obvious.
Check out these five additional ways your organization can profit from using an environmental database management system:
1. Better-informed decision making.
Thanks to its centralized data storage, an EDMS houses not only current project documents but a legacy data library as well. Any authorized person can retrieve the information they need, any time, from anywhere. When you have immediate access to more complete, reliably accurate information, you can develop a more comprehensive range of options. You can more effectively evaluate initial data as well as potential solutions.
Access to historical data and previously-implemented clean-up solutions eliminates time and money spent on redundant effort. You can learn from the past what worked well and what did not, applying that insight to new projects. You can make better-informed decisions throughout the entire course of each investigation.
Because an EDMS enables you to better organize information, it facilitates more effective and more confident project management.
2. Stronger sense of teamwork.
Effective collaboration is essential. But typically the people working on your projects are located at various field sites or in different offices, sometimes far apart. EDMS file-sharing capabilities allow team members to work independently, with select others, or as an entire group whenever they need to.
Because an EDMS facilitates creation of easier-to-understand visualizations of even the most complex conditions, you can spend less time explaining the existing situation to non-scientist members of the group. Instead, your team can spend their time discussing the ramifications of those details and thoroughly exploring options to arrive at the most favorable remediation opportunities.
A team that’s able to work together smoothly and effectively evolves into a more cohesive unit. And a higher-performing, more confident team produces better results.
3. Savings on space and supplies.
Of course an environmental database management system enables you to save money on time re-captured through automation. You can say goodbye to tasks that waste skilled professional time hand-recording data, transcribing it later on and performing endless arithmetic conversions and calculations. Field work no longer requires dragging along bulky books, binders or maps because an EDMS facilitates instant retrieval of data from the field as well as instant upload of newly-collected data.
All that translates into a supremely smaller need for paper and the massive space to store ever-increasing boxes of project documents, because everything is digitally housed within your EDMS. Significant reductions in paper and storage space can substantially reduce costs.
4. Strengthened reputation.
An environmental database management system enables you to do more work, do it better and faster with even stronger results. That means total quality. People want to hire and work with those they can count on to deliver the best, most cost-effective resolution to their problem.
5. You can take on more work.
With an EDMS, you’re functioning at peak productivity. You can complete even huge, complex projects in less time without sacrificing accuracy, thoroughness or creativity. That means you can confidently undertake more projects, increasing your profitability.
What does it all mean? An environmental database management system can help your team work smarter as well as faster, at every step of each investigation. And while the productivity benefits are self-evident, perhaps the most valuable benefit is the personal one: everyone can accomplish their work with far less stress.
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