People who know my background know that I played a role in developing one of the world’s best enterprise environmental emissions calculation and reporting solutions. Today Gartner has a whole Magic Quadrant dedicated to Environmental, Health and Safety Management Systems. Most of the companies in this space built proprietary emission calculation and reporting tools that sit on top of SQL databases. These solutions are costly to procure and even more costly to implement and maintain. It was my experience that after implementing the solution for some emissions, such as air or water emissions, a company would simply cry “Uncle” and revert back to using Microsoft Excel for other emissions to save money.
This time around, at xOverTime, we have taken a different approach with our xEmissions solution. We started with the premise that Microsoft Excel is the world’s best and most widely accepted calculation and reporting tool. These days, I dare someone to find a young environmental engineer that is not an expert in using Excel. So we keep Excel as the calculation and reporting tool and eliminate the costly learning curve that goes with proprietary calculation tools. With xEmissions, we have augmented Excel to create a more useable and cost effective environmental emissions management solution. With xEmissions, environmental staff can understand and “own the calculations” because they are right there in Excel.
The primary capability we needed to add to Excel for the xEmissions solution is a database. xEmissions delivers cloud database capabilities to Excel users without them ever having to leave Excel. Using an Excel Add-in, environmental engineers can take their existing emission calculations in an Excel workbook, and store the key data to a cloud database. Their emission calculation workbooks become a part of a more complete emissions management solution. Within minutes, environmental staff can learn how to push data to the xEmissions database and retrieve it back to Excel for analysis or reporting. Rest APIs are available to automate agency reporting or feeding corporate data warehouses.
To support data governance, data sharing and collaboration xEmissions allows users to control who has access to what data, manage notifications about revised data, and group data into catalogs to support ease of analysis and data sharing. xEmissions supports the versioning of data as well as forecasting and scenario analysis. Users are free to implement various calculation protocols and leverage those provided as Excel files by regulators and industry groups. Excel based calculations can be triggered to occur in an automated manner for storing rolling averages or to support daily management reports.
At xOverTime, we believe we’ve created a better solution approach to environmental emissions calculation and reporting which leverages today’s cloud technologies and open Microsoft Excel architecture to eliminate the problems of proprietary calculation solutions. We have worked with partners and customers on a number of environmental emissions template workbooks. Your current emissions Excel workbooks can easily become the next template for xEmissions. Even if you have a big investment in an environmental data management system, there is a good chance that you still rely on Excel for portions of your emissions management and reporting. We’d like to show you how we can put a database behind that approach and make that data be part of a larger system footprint for your environmental data management and reporting.
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