From May 22nd to the 26th, Battelle will be hosting the Tenth International Conference on Remediation of Chlorinated and Recalcitrant Compounds in Palm Springs, California. Over 1,500 professionals from over 30 countries will gather to present and discuss key topics in the field of environmental remediation. The list of guests and speakers includes a wide array of scientists and engineers as well as representatives of government site management divisions, universities, regulatory agencies, R&D firms and more.
Featured on the list of speakers is Michael Dever, Remediation Project Manager at Ashland Inc. and Roger Well, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at ENFOS, Inc. The two will deliver a presentation on the importance of achieving operational excellence in remediation management. Proper management of environmental remediation project portfolios has proven to be a challenge for both corporations and government entities alike. In a time where national forecasted expenditures for remediation are at their highest, it's imperative to seek out and identify the weak points in your project and reserve management - something Ashland set out to do in 2014 when they initiated an internal study that would assess the efficacy of their reserve forecasting and contracting processes.
In remediation management, project effectiveness is dependent upon the performance of the individual branches of the project - as well as the platform on which they are linked. Ashland mapped out the individual workflows for their project processes, and used a third-party best management practices assessment to identify industry benchmarks for their future objectives. They then conducted a complete inventory and review of the existing information management systems used for project management, reserve estimating, and contractor management.
A year and a half later, the study concluded. The results were used to establish a business case for process change and the implementation of an enterprise management platform. They discovered that a single, annual rework of cost-to-closure estimates for a portfolio yielded approximately 135 hours of additional work for the project team. Using ENFOS software, standardization through the adoption of best practices for reserve management showed a 50 percent reduction in the work effort needed to complete the rework - as well as an improvement in overall data integrity and quality of estimates. Ashland identified other current-state problems through the study, discovering weak points in their reserve and contract management systems such as risk for errors and re-work, multiple versions of critical information and duplicative data management. At the time, ten different information systems were used in the management of these processes. The results were used to define and select a single, web-based enterprise platform to as the core system for liability management - ENFOS.
Join Michael and Roger on May 25th from 4:00 to 6:30 PM PDT at the 2016 Chlorinated Conference to learn more about the implementation of best practices and how to improve the weaker points of your remediation project management.
