Do you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data collection that must be done for your programs? Attend this session to hear about how Sacramento County’s Environmental Management Department streamlined their data collection mandates for the Cross Connect and Hazardous Materials Chemical Inventory Reporting (EPCRA) programs. When faced with processing thousands of pages of test report data from over 14,5000 cross connect devices and a recent law mandating that the Hazardous Materials Chemical Inventory reporting (EPCRA) be uploaded into a statewide California State Environmental Reporting Database (CERS), Sacramento County’s Environmental Management Department not only managed to overcome these overwhelming data obstacles but saved in staff time and cut costs.
The presentation will:
- Review EMD’s efforts to improve their Cross Connect and Hazardous Materials Business Plan Program processes by streamlining how data is captured. This includes outreach to the regulated business community.
- Evaluate the use of a web portal and it’s application strategies of data collection in two environmental program examples.
- Understand a web portal can save time and costs to both staff and the regulated public industry.
Data collection and management is time consuming! The way it's listed out looks like you will save a lot of costs in running the programs.
ReplyDeleteIs the setup something that can be copied and put into use easily? Is there an "app" that goes along with it? Good luck!
The coding that shuttles the data between our internal tracking software (EnvisionConnect) and the portal was heavily customized, as this program is somewhat unique. Copying the code to another environment would be complex undertaking, although I'm sure it could be done. The technical staff that has been working on this project knew little about the details of the Cross Connection program when this started, but learned as the project progessed.
DeleteWhat are the capital costs in setting up an electronic portal like this? It looks like a great idea for large inventories, is it too expensive though for smaller scale operations?
ReplyDeleteWe did the Cross COnnection portal project as an add-on to a bigger Portal project, the Hazardous Business Plan program mentioned above, so I'm not sure what the stand-alone costs would be for just this component. We pay an additional $10,000 per year to set up and maintain the Cross Connection piece of the portal, although if the time that EMD staff have spent working with the developers was counted, the total would be much higher. We justified it by the savings it will produce by converting a largely manual process into a mostly automated one. It looks like the project will pay for itself in less than a year.
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