Auditors and environmental, health and safety (EHS) professionals in the United States have a number of options for legal compliance tools. EHS legal compliance is a complicated beast, but it could best be divided into two tasks: staying up to speed on requirements and periodically conducting compliance audits and inspections. Both parts require a deep knowledge of the regulatory requirements and how they apply to your facilities, but let’s talk about the second part for now — conducting periodic compliance audits and inspections.
When it comes to EHS compliance auditing in the U.S., you have a variety of options. You can use a commerically available audit protocol, you can make your own audit tool, or you can use a combination of both. Most companies nowadays use the third option – the combination.
Afterall, relying exclusively on your own internally developed protocol carries several obvious risks. It takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with U.S. regulatory requirements, and so there is always the chance you miss a relevant regulation or misinterpret it. That’s why using a commercial protocol built by EHS professionals offers a level of added assurance that you are addressing all of the regulations that apply to your facilities.
Along the same lines, developing your own tool based on corporate requirements has advantages. It allows your audit team to focus on requirements that are germane to your industry and issues that you know are of concern for your company. We can go on and on about the advantages each option provides, but for now let it suffice to say that it is no surprise why the combination approach is today’s best practice.
When you’re choosing audit tools and software, today’s auditors need an option that provides a high quality commercial audit protocol,developed by dependable EHS experts, and at the same time easily allows auditors to add and edit corporate requirements and review and track results concurrently. When it comes to U.S. federal and state audit protocols, you do not have as many options as you might think, for a country of 300 million people. We would say the main options are ENHASA, Dakota Software, STP, Bloomberg BNA, and Nimonik. Let’s take a moment to consider what each of them has to offer.
The cost for ENHESA varies by country and by state, but it can generally be viewed as $ 1 000 – 5000 $ per country or per state. Dakota starts at over $10 000 and STP with BloombergBNA offers Federal and States for about $2 500 – $4 000 per state. In contrast, Nimonik offers Federal protocols starting at $ 700 and State protocols at only $300.
ENHESA | Dakota | STP | BloombergBNA | Nimonik |
$ 1 000 – 5000 $ per country or per state | $10 000 + | $2 500 – $4 000 | $2 500 – $4 000 | $ 500 – $ 2000 |
No Mobile App | No Mobile App | No Mobile App | Poor Mobile App | World Class Mobile app for iPad and iPhone |
No web based solution | Web based solution and hosted solution | Limited functionality on web based solution | Limited functionality on web Based Solution | High quality and powerful web based solution |
Global Coverage | USA | USA | Global (via STP and ENHESA) | Canada, United States, UK, France and more. |
All of our prices for US Environmental, Health and Safety Compliance Templates are listed publicly and we offer free thirty day trials on our audit system. With our state of the art iPad tool and Nimonik, we can offer our clients the most affordable and easiest to use platform on the market. But don’t take our word for it, try the system out or give us a call for a free demonstration at 1-888-608-7511 or at info@nimonik.com
