The Company
Westar Energy is a Topeka, KS based consumer services company focused on energy and monitored services. Its utilities, KPL and KGE, have a generating capacity of more than 5,000 MW, and provide electric service to more than 630,000 customers in Kansas.

The Challenge
Westar determined that a lack of centralization in its environmental management processes was increasing the potential for duplication of effort and inconsistency in reporting. The company's management wanted to implement a formal environmental management system (EMS) that would address these inefficiencies and better document compliance activities. It was determined that an environmental management information system (EMIS) would provide opportunities to streamline compliance-related activities and would serve as a solid foundation for the overall EMS.

The Solution
After reviewing the available software packages, Western Resources selected opsEnvironmental. The first phase of the software implementation focused on air emissions inventory reports and Title V compliance management. The company developed a new business process that integrates with opsEnvironmental to increase efficiency in compliance-related activities. Specifically, use of opsEnvironmental has allowed Western Resources to effectively tackle the following initiatives:

Air Emission Inventory Support. The software's centralized database has enabled a substantial reduction in manual data entry, as well as reduced inconsistencies as a result of using a single, centralized source for data retrieval.

Title V Compliance Management. By using opsEnvironmental's web tools, environmental staff and corporate management will be able to easily review tasks and mark them complete. Supervisors will be automatically notified by e-mail if tasks are not completed in a timely manner. Reports of upcoming tasks can be easily generated and used as an aid to resource management. Furthermore, completion of periodic compliance certifications will be facilitated by the reporting feature of opsEnvironmental, which will make it easy to identify areas of non-compliance.

The value of implementing the new EMIS has been demonstrated not only by reducing the burden on environmental staff, but also by providing Westar a framework which precludes the future occurrence of inconsistencies and inefficiencies. The success of these initial efforts has led to the expansion of opsEnvironmental to serve as the core of Westar’s environmental management system. A second implementation phase, currently underway, is focusing on the use of opsEnvironmental to track compliance requirements, assessments, and corrective actions for all environmental media and programs at Westar’s power generation facilities.

Through the opsEnvironmental EMIS system, Westar has empowered its environmental staff to take initiative, thereby achieving better environmental management overall. By making it easy for all the affected staff to be tied in to the system through e-mail ticklers and task lists, opsEnvironmental enables buy-in from every employee, and helps motivate them to see that compliance tasks are not only done, but are done correctly. This helps Westar ensure the best possible environmental performance.