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What is EHS software, and where facility data fits

Published October 11, 20263 min read
Milvian AI teamFacilities and infrastructure intelligence
Aerial view of an industrial park

EHS software manages environment, health and safety programs: incidents, permits, inspections, training and audits. It records what people report; facility monitoring supplies what the building measures.

The system of record

Environment, health and safety software is the system of record for a company's EHS program. It logs incidents and near misses, tracks permits and their conditions, schedules inspections and training, manages corrective actions and produces reports for regulators and boards.

Most of its data is entered by people: an inspector's checklist, a lab result, an incident report. Between those entries, conditions in the building go unrecorded.

Who owns what

TaskEHS softwareFacility monitoring
Incidents and corrective actions.Owns the workflow.Supplies the readings around the event.
Permits and consents.Tracks conditions and deadlines.Meters the flows and levels the permit limits.
Air and water conditions.Stores sample results.Measures continuously between samples.
Energy and emissions.Compiles the report.Provides metered consumption by site.

Why measured data is growing in importance

Indoor air is a clear example. Americans spend about 90 percent of their time indoors, where EPA notes some pollutants run two to five times higher than outdoors, and a periodic survey cannot show how long a level was sustained. Exposure limits are written as time-weighted averages: OSHA's silica limit for construction is 50 micrograms per cubic meter over 8 hours.

Regulation is moving toward measured data. EPA tightened the annual PM2.5 standard to 9.0 micrograms per cubic meter in February 2024, and Europe's ESRS E3 asks for metered water consumption, withdrawal and discharge.

How to connect the two

  1. List the conditions you sampleEach is a candidate for continuous measurement.
  2. Decide the system of recordKeep incidents and actions in EHS software.
  3. Agree thresholdsLet EHS set when a reading becomes an event.
  4. Integrate or exportSend events and summaries into the EHS tool.

Where Aqueduct fits

Aqueduct is facility monitoring, not EHS software. aQ AirSafe measures air by zone with exposure in zone-hours, aQ WaterGuard meters water, effluent and reuse, and aQ EnergySmart meters energy by feeder. aQ Core keeps every reading with device health, ready to feed the EHS system you already use.

Sources

SourceLink
US EPA, Indoor Air Qualityepa.gov
OSHA, 29 CFR 1926.1153 Respirable crystalline silicaosha.gov
US EPA, PM2.5 NAAQS reconsideration, 2024epa.gov
EFRAG, ESRS E3 delegated actknowledgehub.efrag.org
Questions

Questions about this topic

No. EHS software is where people record and manage the program; environmental monitoring is where instruments measure conditions such as air, water and energy around the clock. Most companies need both, with a monitoring layer such as Aqueduct passing readings into the EHS tool.

ISO 14001 for environmental management and ISO 45001 for occupational health and safety are the most common frameworks, alongside local regulation such as OSHA rules and discharge consents. Aqueduct supplies measured data for the monitoring clauses. See ISO 14001.

Yes, when sensor health and calibration are recorded and the data is kept unaltered. Aqueduct stores each reading with the device's connection rate and battery or capacitor voltage, so an auditor can see the sensor was working when the reading was taken.

In Aqueduct, an alert rule takes a metric, a condition, a value and a severity, and the EHS team decides each one. For air, exposure counted in zone-hours keeps brief spikes from flooding the EHS tool with events that need no action. See IAQ monitoring.

See Aqueduct on your own facility.

Bring a site, a utility bill or a question. We will show you where the loss is.