When choosing Locus, you can be confident that your EHS software is built and supported by the experts. Our team holds degrees and certifications in environmental engineering, mathematics, computer science, and beyond. We understand the challenges of EHS compliance and build our solutions with those in mind.
Locus’ Air Quality app is designed to integrate with data sources to seamlessly calculate air emissions monthly or annually. Our application can then produce XML, CSV and other emission reports which can be uploaded directly to regulatory sites.
Assets are compiled based on configurable templates. Each asset type has its own form with input values, and the associated emission factors and calculations are shown to transparently display the model used to calculate the asset’s emissions. To build out the model, data for every asset may be uploaded from Excel or migrated from legacy systems.
Once created, the asset presents a self-contained, transparent view of the asset properties, data, emissions factors, calculations, results, with the capability to add more information.
Locus Technology’s flexible configuration tool makes reporting your organization’s Air Quality straightforward.
One of the most frequent conversations we have is with EHS professionals who approach us with struggles concerning their current software solution. They often seek out Locus out of frustration, because their current software provider focuses almost exclusively on the safety side of EHS. While there’s nothing innately wrong with focusing on one aspect of EHS, most professionals need a more robust software to meet their needs. They need a solution that can handle the environmental side of EHS.
When we ask what they’re missing, it ranges depending on their current software, and most commonly these professionals don’t have the ability to automate environmental data collection, management, and reporting. They are, for the most part, entering everything by hand and reporting to local, state, and federal agencies manually. The lack of a proper solution from their current provider means that they’re doing more work and potentially misreporting due to repeat entry errors.
EHS professionals Must focus on a wide range of issues, and a lack of versatility in their software solution means that they have to work harder to fill in the gap in their existing process and software solutions. When Locus is approached, most of the time it’s by professionals seeking relief, and they find us because we offer a tool that both meets their needs and makes their work less stressful.
The environmental side of EHS is vast, and professionals are expected handle anything from air and GHG emissions to water, waste and beyond. And while other providers offer anything from a bare bones solution to enough to get by, Locus knows that a robust solution can reduce the burden, time, and potential inaccuracies that EHS professionals face. We know because we’ve been there. Locus software is developed by and for EHS professionals. Our domain experts have had to deal with the struggles of subpar software, so that’s why we make a solution to fit the needs of our peers. That’s why our EHS software features a full suite of solutions, and a robust calculation engine.
Over the longer term, we envision a world where we can use shared environmental data to take a more concerted approach to our collective environmental stewardship. We consider the work at Locus an essential step in addressing a monumental global problem.
The conversation about the environmental landscape has evolved drastically over the last 50 years as we continue to understand how human activity has affected the planet. The 21st century’s environmental challenges are manifold as shortages of drinkable water; the impact of various pollutants that enter our atmosphere, including greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater, radioactive materials, and other hazardous materials; the strains of our ever-increasing population on limited resources, and threatened ecosystems; and climate change causing extreme weather conditions to push more and more of the population into a precarious situation.
Companies and society need a collective and holistic understanding of the problems we face. The only way to understand the whole picture and act meaningfully on a global level is for all companies to understand the impact of their activities. It’s impossible to mitigate the risks and effects of those activities on the planet when we do not have the data to characterize the problem and see a complete picture of what we face.
This whole picture will require us to monitor an unprecedented quantity of data, and with this massive data explosion, Locus’s current efforts come into play. We are working to ensure that we are prepared for this ever-increasing data tsunami by laying the groundwork with the companies and government agencies Locus works with daily. They are already tracking increased data, analyzing their activities, finding ways to operate more efficiently, producing fewer emissions and less wastewater, and improving their environmental footprints. Locus would like to see the scale of those mitigation efforts increase a thousand-fold over the next ten years and for our efforts to yield clear improvements in our collective environmental impacts.
While someday we may have environmental data sharing among all public and private organizations, the regulatory bodies that govern them, and the scientific community, which will provide us with an even more complete picture of our environmental activities, any coordinated effort is years in the making. In the meantime, Locus ensures we are ready to help tackle the problem.
This is the final post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here.
For many, climate change management and carbon accounting present a new opportunity, a new domain to be conquered by software. The upside looks huge, next frontier, next bubble. But it is not that simple. Instead of a single part, there is a family of domains, each with its not that simple science interwoven with many unsynchronized reporting standards and sometimes competing regulations. There are no clear regulations or other drivers to normalize the playing field. Nevertheless, ESG reporting created a hype that looks more like the medieval battle for territory.
Locus software has dominated the EHS compliance space for the last two decades. Consequently, Locus has the best shot at the ESG software market as the company has been gradually pivoting into sustainability software for some time. Locus software already manages most enterprise customers’ data in their EHS apps necessary for ESG reporting. Most importantly, Locus has the domain expertise to build software applications to match the complexity of ESG reporting and carbon accounting. In other words, Locus understands the science behind data and has used this expertise to quickly build a science-based reporting infrastructure leveraging Locus’ already strong presence in the space.
Locus’s applications are based on science and backed by data primarily from the EHS compliance for companies that disclose their information based on verified scientific data and actual readings from their instruments, lab results, resource consumption, waste generation, or water and energy management.
One of the biggest drivers of ESG software will be the convergence of climate change, water, and energy crises in the coming years. This sustainability and EHS compliance elements must coexist in a highly scalable real-time software platform that only a modern, multitenant cloud architecture offers. Locus has it.
Locus ESG software offers a SaaS platform that incorporates unified data layers that give Locus customers a consolidated view of their data across different business silos, scopes, and integrated EHS and ESG platforms.
Locus’ unified data layer brings varying data sources together to offer a single view of a company’s climate-related data. Using Locus’s shared SaaS-based applications and platforms could also give investment managers tools to evaluate their investment strategies and up-to-date opinions on their portfolio performance on ESG elements.
At Locus, we are genuinely driven by the dynamic industries we serve and the changing environmental landscape we must all work to safeguard. We help solve our customers’ complex environmental problems, improve the way environmental professionals work, and offer new ways to organize vast amounts of environmental, sustainability, and energy data on the Web. We turn environmental and energy data into actionable, real-time information. Most importantly, we help our clients lower operating costs and reduce environmental risk exposure and liability.
This is the eighth post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here. This series concludes with Locus at 25 Years: A Long-Term Vision for Environmental Stewardship.
For the last 25 years, Locus has synthesized knowledge of environmental science with a vision for effectively gathering, aggregating, visualizing, and analyzing emissions of all sorts and environmental data. This work aims to help organizations marshal their environmental data to manage better and, where possible, reduce their environmental footprints.
This approach has differed from many other environmental software startups that have come and gone in the past ten years. Locus’ distinction comes from harnessing the true multitenant Cloud and a unique perspective on how to address the complex issues of environmental information management. Cloud technology offers Locus customers numerous advantages: Improved data collection,
aggregation, visualization, business analytics, and analysis, and the cost reduction inherent in web-based software all translate into a competitive advantage and increased customer profitability.
So, rather than “one software solution per problem,” Locus has built an enterprise-scale software solution tailored to meet all customer’s needs in a single SaaS platform. This approach eliminates redundancy and incompatibility issues with other enterprise-management systems, giving organizations unprecedented control over their data. As the industry evolves and new markets continue to grow, Locus is positioned to grow with them, staying at the forefront of environmental and sustainability information management and promoting a vision of collaborative global stewardship.
And that global stewardship is where Locus would like to see environmental data management have a more significant impact on policy, mitigation efforts, and understanding the complete picture of how human activities affect the planet.
Locus is not just selling software to address an evolving regulatory landscape (which is why most customers are looking for environmental compliance software) but also because there is an underlying urgency to tackle what the Locus team views—along with many other scientists—as a climate and environmental crisis. The 21st century’s environmental challenges include shortages of drinkable water; the impact of various pollutants that enter our atmosphere; the strains of our ever-increasing population on limited resources and threatened ecosystems; and climate change causing extreme weather conditions that push more and more the world’s population into precariousness.
We need a collective and holistic understanding of the problems we face. The only way to understand the whole picture and act meaningfully globally is for all of us to share the data we gather about our activities. It’s impossible to mitigate the risks and effects of our actions on the planet when we don’t have the data to characterize the problem and see a complete picture of what we face.
This complete picture will require us to monitor and collect an unprecedented quantity of data, and it’s with this massive data explosion, Locus’s vision comes into play. To achieve this end, organizations in the private and public sectors will need to track and upload their environmental data; subsequently, these data need to be made available through an interconnected database for environmental data management so that scientists and others can collectively view the results of our activities and act on a grander scale.
Getting to the point of sharing all of these data is an important stretch goal right now, but it’s the direction Locus hopes to see environmental data management move in the future. In the meantime, Locus is working to support organizations of all sizes to gather their data, understand it better, and act on their analyses to improve their environmental footprints.
This is the seventh post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here. This series continues with Locus at 25 Years: Climate Change Software, A Generational Opportunity.
Locus’s strategic focus has always been to deliver intelligent, well-designed software applications that add value to customers’ bottom lines. The success of these applications is rooted in the deep environmental domain and content experience of the Locus team, its proven data management capabilities, and its view that customers who own their data maintain a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Locus’s perseverance developed the world’s first commercial online environmental information management, collaboration, and compliance system. Locus’ EIM revolutionized how environmental data is stored, accessed, managed, and reported— ultimately saving customers time and money and giving them the power to be “green on demand.” Locus Platform gave customers tools to consume EIM data in various applications built on top of it, communicating with each other. Locus delivered the industry’s first unified EHS compliance and ESG reporting system.
Locus SaaS has evolved to encompass more and more aspects of strategic business planning. While a critical incentive to using Locus Platform and EIM systems is regulatory compliance, Locus has taken a more comprehensive view of the mandate to improve environmental stewardship by creating plans to improve environmental performance across clients’ organizational silos; sites, and regulatory programs; emission sources to air, soil, or water; energy management; all aspects of Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) issues, sustainability and ESG reporting, and technology platforms and mobile devices.
While most environmental software firms have focused on tracking one area of concern, such as greenhouse gases or incident management, Locus built the most comprehensive software platform for managing compliance and organizing environmental and resource data and information. Using Locus’ SaaS, customers can collect, organize, search, report, maintain, and preserve all the required documentation and data for environmental compliance and sustainability management. Locus integrates risk management, compliance, sustainability management, and water quality management under a single umbrella. Locus software integrates with other enterprise resource planning software—part of the big picture for governance, risk and compliance (GRC), risk management, compliance, and health and safety software.
Our holistic view of GRC enables transparency and connectivity across an organization – sparking the insights that most organizations need to make better decisions.
Our SaaS platform supports leading organizations by:
The resulting Locus applications, primarily EIM and Locus Platform, help companies better record, track, manage, analyze, and share information regarding water, air, energy, waste, sustainability, ESG, and EHS compliance management.
This is the sixth post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The previous post can be found here. This series continues with Locus at 25 Years: Innovative Approach and Plans.
From its founding, Locus recognized an opportunity to think bigger about managing the environmental data and squeezing more value. In 1999, Locus introduced the first cloud-based ecological data management software, EIM. In 2000 Locus offered the first generation of the Locus Platform to house EHS compliance apps. Over the last 25 years, Locus software has expanded to cover more and more aspects of environmental compliance, sustainability (ESG), energy and water quality management, air emissions, waste, mitigation, and stewardship for the companies that use it. We provided software that helped Locus’ customers be credible with their environmental and ESG reporting.
Locus wants to give companies software tools that enable them to be proactive in their environmental stewardship; to date, most organizations have incorporated environmental policies reactively, primarily driven by regulations. Greenwashing, “a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization’s products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly,” seems commonplace.
To paraphrase Sam Cooke, change is coming, and it can’t be stopped. Today, we are experiencing new environmental challenges. EHS compliance is being replaced by a much stronger driver–the existential threat to the planet Earth arising from climate change caused by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. New tools are needed to help organizations comply with expanded governmental regulations and manage the growing avalanche of data to assess sustainability issues, calculate GHG emissions, etc. Locus’s ESG platform is well-positioned to meet this need and is used by many companies for these purposes.
Locus’ vision extends well beyond the current requirements that ESG is constructed to address. Our company is looking at longer-term applications for its software by considering the role of technology in combatting the collective environmental challenges that beset us. Given the heavy and relentless toll of human activities on the planet, we need to address how we can gather and analyze sufficient data to accurately assess where we stand and what changes are required to alter our course? Collecting and tracking all these data, examining them in the aggregate, and understanding how all our activities are affecting climate change, habitat erosion, and public health issues can, in the end, help society address these challenges collectively. Without adequate data to measure emission levels and the rate of changes we see in the environment doing and at what rate, without a sound factual basis, it’s going to be impossible to mitigate the damage at the correct scale.
At first glance, the convergence of Blockchain with ESG reporting might seem to be contradictory, but a more in-depth analysis of trends shows its value. Blockchain has rapidly transformed into a financial reporting and attestation tool that has caught the attention of many vital decision-makers and technology drivers. At the same time, the importance of ESG has never been more pronounced. Combining the two could be the key to making ESG reporting more straightforward and more meaningful. The broader trends are alike: each has been steadily making inroads into organizational management and the reporting landscape. The difference is that now, with accelerated digital transformation and automation, both broader trends have moved into a much sharper focus.
Blockchain technology is ideally suited for the complexities of tracking a global supply chain. Improving the traceability of supply chains is old news in terms of goods, but supply chains are much bigger than that. Securing the information that drives business decision-making is where Blockchain can deliver significant value.
Blockchain technology will allow companies to track resources from the first appearance in their supply chain, certifying their products’ compliance with regulations and their quality. Blockchain technology would enable government agencies to effectively aggregate emissions quantities and origins across geographies, industries, and other criteria. More importantly, all parties would need only one record software system to avoid constant synchronization, submittals, and reporting requirements.
Though their data may be more transparent, corporations benefit considerably from adopting a technology in which all their emissions and other data reside in a single record system. Along the way, companies would undoubtedly lower their operating cost and, at the same time, reduce the dizzying number of unconnected, heavily supported, siloed software applications they currently operate to keep in compliance with existing environmental regulations.
This is the fifth post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The first four can be found here, here, here, and here. This series continues with Locus at 25 Years: A Unified Approach to EHS and ESG.
Many in our material-driven culture, particularly in Silicon Valley, assign more excellent value to companies based on how much venture capital or private equity money they have raised or how quickly their companies have grown after initial seeding, and less to founders who bootstrapped their companies from nothing and after that, positioned them for long and steady growth. Although the term means different things in different areas of knowledge, in entrepreneurship, bootstrapping is the process of starting a business with little or no external funding.
Locus has proven that how much funding a startup company has raised or how quickly it has grown are the wrong metrics to measure a company’s success, particularly in the arena of environmental compliance and data management. We bootstrapped Locus in 1997 and, without outside capital, created a new industry at the intersection of two significant trends before either was a trend: the growth in Internet usage and the growth in the acquisition, storage, and analysis of environmental information. Locus not only defined and pioneered this new space of environmental information management in the cloud but also became an industry leader leaving behind many well-funded startups with “borrowed ideas” and established ERP software companies. At every startup stage, some actions are “right” for the startup to maximize return on time, money, and effort. Fortunately, Locus took the necessary steps that allowed it to weather several recessions and market downfalls.
While bootstrapping techniques are not just limited to funding, they also apply to how companies are run. By bootstrapping Locus, we created a built-to-last, slow-burn startup that was focused on the singular goal of building a cloud-based environmental data information management system and avoided expending effort on expanding applications that the market did not need or those that we were too dependent on external help. Bootstrapping provided Locus with a strategic roadmap for achieving sustainability through customer funding (i.e., partnering with customers)—if it is essential for Locus, it must be necessary for the customer first. If it is vital for customers, they must pay for a portion of it and have “skin in the game. “We don’t build applications to attract customers. We attract customers with our ideas to build applications together” became Locus’s modus operandi: Locus was born and built with this simple philosophy.
Once Locus had built a solid customer base, Locus encouraged its paying customers to become consultants who defined the Locus product map. This strategy resulted in a rapid evolutionary expansion of Locus’ software in the marketplace. Crowdsourcing product development from customers with real-world problems has become the cornerstone of Locus’ success in the market.
Let us digress here to comment on what it takes to build an environmental database management system. In the 1990s, when Dr. Duplan was leading the development of a client-server database for his then-employer (there were no internet-based databases back then), he and others now at Locus attended a trade show where a product called Oracle Environmental or something like that was being marketed. Yes, this is the same Oracle that is now one of the largest software companies in the world, with a market cap in the hundreds of billions, revenues in the tens of billions, profits in the billions, and over 130,000 employees.
This small group of engineers and scientists wondered how they could compete against a growing behemoth like Oracle with all its programmers and financial resources. They listened to a marketing spiel and took the system for a test drive at Oracle’s booth. Their worries almost immediately vanished. What they saw was characterized by all as a system that was “a mile wide and an inch deep.” It was designed and developed by individuals with no field experience, little or no engineering or scientific expertise, and little understanding of environmental data and data flow. It claimed to touch on many different types of data (which it did) but owing to its lack of depth, it clearly could not work in the real world. Sure enough, the product was gone within a few years.
In contrast, EIM has been designed and developed by individuals with advanced degrees in civil and environmental engineering, water resources, geology, chemistry, and biology. All who are not solely computer programmers have spent serious time in the field, have overseen the drilling of boreholes and wells, planned and collected samples, verified and validated analytical data, and have created data reports for internal, external entities. These individuals are very cognizant of the vagaries of environmental data.
All these questions make sense to us, and we have an answer to them. Our deep domain expertise in such matters, coupled with our backgrounds in engineering and the sciences and our relevant work experience, has enabled us to work with our customers to build ground-breaking tools and modules for our products that work for all companies.
While other environmental software companies have come and gone—often after getting much press, only to fizzle out on broken promises and dried-up funding, Locus has never wavered from its path to provide environmental data management services to corporations and government agencies. Despite the absence of a flashy PR machine and VC or PE funding, Locus has continued to be a profitable, independent, and visionary organization, which is now considered one of the top environmental software companies in the world.
This is the fourth post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The first three can be found here and here, and here. This series continues with Locus at 25 Years: Blockchain for Emissions Management.
Locus Platform is the preeminent on-demand application development platform for EHS, ESG, and beyond, supporting many organizations and government institutions. Individual enterprises and governmental organizations trust Locus’s SaaS Platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. The foundation of Locus Platform (LP) is a metadata-driven software architecture that enables multitenant applications. This unique technology, a significant differentiator between Locus and its competitors, makes the Locus Platform fast, scalable, and secure for any application. What do we mean by metadata-driven? If you look up metadata-driven development on the web, you find the following:
“The metadata-driven model for building applications allows an Enterprise to deploy multiple applications on the same hosting infrastructure easily. Since multiple applications share the same Designer and Rendering Engine, the only difference is the metadata created uniquely for each application.”
The Triumph of the Multitenant SaaS model, which Locus brings to the EHS/ESG industry.
In the case of LP, it is the Designer and Rendering Engine cited in this definition. All LP customers share this engine and use it to create their custom applications. These applications may consist of dashboards, forms to enter data, plots, reports, and so forth, all designed to meet a set of requirements. Instructions (metadata) stored in a database tell the engine how to build these entities, the total of which form a client-designed application.
Locus Platform’s evolution to the leading EHS and ESG Platform.
History has shown that every so often, incremental advances in technology and changes in business models create significant paradigm shifts in the way software applications are designed, built, and delivered to end-users. The invention of personal computers (PCs), computer networking, and graphical user interfaces (UIs) gave rise to the adoption of client/server applications over expensive, inflexible, character-mode mainframe applications. And today, reliable broadband Internet access, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and the cost inefficiencies of managing dedicated on-premises applications are driving a transition toward the delivery of decomposable, collected, shared, Web-based services called software as a service (SaaS).
With every paradigm shift comes a new set of technical challenges, and SaaS is no different. Existing application frameworks are not designed to address the unique needs of SaaS. This void has given rise to another new paradigm shift, namely platform as a service (PaaS). Hosted application platforms are managed environments specifically designed to meet the unique challenges of building SaaS applications and deliver them more cost-efficiently.
The focus of Locus Platform is multitenancy, a fundamental design approach that dramatically improves the manageability of EHS and ESG SaaS applications. Locus Platform is the world’s first PaaS built from scratch to take advantage of the latest software developments for building EHS, ESG, sustainability, and other applications. Locus Platform delivers turnkey multitenancy for Internet-scale applications.
A single shared software and hardware stack across all customers.
The same applies to many different sets of users; all Locus’ LP applications are multitenant rather than single-tenant. Whereas a traditional single-tenant application requires a dedicated group of resources to fulfill the needs of just one organization, a multitenant application can satisfy the needs of multiple tenants (companies or departments within a company, etc.) using the hardware resources and staff needed to manage just a single software instance. A multitenant application cost-efficiently shares a single stack of resources to satisfy the needs of multiple organizations.
Single-tenant apps are expensive for the vendor and the customer.
Tenants using a multitenant service operate in virtual isolation: Organizations can use and customize an application as though they each have a separate instance. Yet, their data and customizations remain secure and insulated from the activity of all other tenants. The single application instance effectively morphs at runtime for any particular tenant at any given time.
Single-tenant apps create waste
Multitenancy is an architectural approach that pays dividends to application providers (Locus) and users (Locus customers). Operating just one application instance for multiple organizations yields tremendous economy of scale for the provider. Only one set of hardware resources is necessary to meet the needs of all users, a relatively small, experienced administrative staff can efficiently manage only one stack of software and hardware, and developers can build and support a single code base on just one platform (operating system, database, etc.) rather than many. The economics afforded by multitenancy allows the application provider to, in turn, offer the service at a lower cost to customers—everyone involved wins.
Some attractive side benefits of multitenancy are improved quality, user satisfaction, and customer retention. Unlike single-tenant applications, which are isolated silos deployed outside the reach of the application provider, a multitenant application is one large community that the provider itself hosts. This design shift lets the provider gather operational information from the collective user population (which queries respond slowly, what errors happen, etc.) and make frequent, incremental improvements to the service that benefits the entire user community at once.
Two additional benefits of a multitenant platform-based approach are collaboration and integration. Because all users run all applications in one space, it is easy to allow any user of any application varied access to specific data sets. This capability simplifies the effort necessary to integrate related applications and the data they manage.
Gartner recognized the power of the Locus Platform in their early research.
This is the third post highlighting the evolution of Locus Technologies over the past 25 years. The first two can be found here and here. This series continues with Locus at 25 Years: How did we fund Locus?