Realising operational value from environmental data at an industrial port

Due to the high risk of dust from multiple port facilities affecting a nearby community, a port authority in Western Australia has an environmental licence with specific conditions addressing compliance and dust management. In order to meet these licence requirements, staff at the Port Authority are required to complete routine internal and external reports and submit them to the state environmental regulator to demonstrate compliance. In addition, the port authority also must maintain transparency with the surrounding community by implementing a ‘complaints register’.

The port operations team was spending a significant time and effort on manually collecting and reporting the necessary data. They looked for an effective and efficient system to make the process easier and less time-consuming.

The Port Authority had a number of dust monitors set up around its site and was also planning to add more in order to meet licence requirements. Operations staff were taking manually downloaded data from these monitors in order to compile the data into reports.

The image above shows Envirosuite's 'Environmental Compliance' solution being used for dust management in Ports. 

Envirosuite ‘Environmental Compliance’ and ‘Incident Intelligence’ solutions have been implemented at the site. The Environmental Compliance solution provides the operations team with up-to-the-minute data on environmental status and performance by visualising recorded dust levels in real-time. An alert system brings attention to emerging issues in real time. The system also provides automated reporting to the operations team to assist with regulatory reporting requirements.

The ‘Incident Intelligence’ solution executes a backwards trajectory model for a current or past time period. Using on-site weather data, this solution helps greatly to identify the source of any complaints registered in the community in near real time. This data is able to be used for historical review and reporting purposes, but more importantly, for investigating current complaints - reducing time and uncertainty to quickly identify and deal with the source.

The operations team is now empowered with environmental data and associated guidance information on dust levels in real-time. This allows the team to instantly visualise areas of high risk that may jeopardise licence compliance. The data is also archived and retrievable on demand to provide evidence of compliance to satisfy regulators.

If there are any complaints from the community, the Port Authority has a thorough ticket-based complaints workflow management system in place and is able to start complaint investigations with a backwards trajectory report and other information that narrows down the search for the source. This allows the Port Authority to quickly identify which port operator is responsible for the dust impacts.

 <<Embed video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZc97rNwiqs&feature=emb_imp_woyt>>