Environment, health, and safety is an industry guidance helping organizations to conduct business responsively. It encompasses legislative frameworks allowing companies to facilitate business productivity, while protecting the environment, the safety of workers, and well-being of end-consumers.

The principles of the industry guidance can vary in dependence to the specific context, but there are some common principles to mention:

• Prevention
• Compliance
• Employee training and education
• Stakeholder engagement
• Risk assessment and management
• Continuous improvement

Quick overview of the engineering project

Our client is empowering its customers with insights and solutions to improve EHS compliance across domains. This way, their customers can protect the environment, their employees, and end-consumers.

Our company has covered the implementation of an offline mode for an EHS compliance reporting platform. The project enabled inspectors to process found inconsistencies at examined industrial facilities even without Internet connection.

Working on the project, our team was involved in implementing the following on-demand functionality:

• New conformity task creation
• Existing conformity task editing
• New conformity task assignment to executors
• Recently synchronized report access

During implementation, our engineers were additionally focused on:

• Improving existing user authorization
• Maintaining necessary REST API HTTP requests for service that require Internet connection

The solution: The details to mention

The described EHS compliance reporting platform enables organizations to monitor their operations:

• The managers create tasks
• The inspectors follow instructions to verify control parameters associated with EHS compliance
• The system creates reports
• The organization obtains insights to take immediate measures if needed

The said EHS platform includes the following functionality:

• User authorization
• User profiles
• Task management
• Content attachment (images, videos)

Our contribution

Our client was selling a custom-made, cloud-based product — a convenient EHS compliance reporting platform. The software can provide data digitization, data management, instant notification, and many other features that provide business value to organizations that care about sustainability.

Our company has covered the implementation of an offline mode by using domain knowledge and experience, which encompassed:

• User authorization
• Data synchronization

Key concerns and outcomes

Main challenges

The implementation of the essential functionality in the offline mode commonly causes numerous challenges, but leveraging extensive expertise in handling data management for companies across industries, our team successfully resolved each one of them.

The project’s main challenges can be reduced to:

User authorization

The deadlines and funding were limited, which forbid comprehensive refactoring of the legacy infrastructure. To handle this problem, our team has implemented refresh tokens, which enabled logged-in users to always remain authorized.

Data storage

The existing legacy product was an off-the-shelf application, which handicapped comprehensive adjustments. To handle this issue, our engineers have used the open-source WatermelonDB database for the data storage.

Core benefits

The opportunity to utilize important functionality in the offline mode brings significant competitive advantage — by modernizing the custom-designed, cloud-based product, our engineers have transformed the application into a unique software, which notably stands out from similar competitor solutions.

Talking about user attraction, usability design is the key aspect to consider when building mobile applications.

The implementation of an offline mode might provide:

• Improved productivity
• Enhanced performance
• Prolonged device battery life
• Customer satisfaction and retention

Speaking about EHS compliance, offline mode might enable:

• Timely recognition and response to inconsistencies
• Quick evaluation and adjustment of processes
• Time and cost savings
• Regulatory compliance

Summing up

Environment, health, and safety is a key guidance for most large segments — construction, energy, and others. Acknowledged frameworks guide decision-makers through adopting appropriate processes to prevent environmental damage and ensure labor safety, consumer health, and overall business efficiency.

With an easy-to-navigate product, which supports offline access, many sectors can leverage notable benefits. Responsible leaders can not only remain regulatory compliant, but scale business safely, without risking reputational and financial damage.