Better data, better reporting

Borealis relies on Emisoft for seamless data integration, high quality reporting and effective environmental compliance management.

For a company that’s only two decades old, Borealis has endured a considerable amount of change, from ownership to focus to location. Yet embracing change is key to innovation, and an inherent capability for agility and invention define both history and future of Europe’s second largest petrochemical producer. Combine that with a longstanding commitment to supporting the health of global communities and the environment, and Borealis becomes a natural fit for its chosen environmental compliance management partner, Emisoft.

Founded in 1994 as a merging of Neste and Equinor operations, Borealis was a quintessentially Northern European and forward-thinking organisation from the start. Its name means “from the north”, in reference to its Nordic roots, and the company introduced a progressive official Ethics Policy and an international forum for open communication between employees and management within months of opening. In 1997 the integrated international oil and gas company OMV and the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) of Abu Dhabi bought Neste’s 50% share. Eight years later, OMV and IPIC bought Equinor’s half, and Borealis moved its headquarters from Denmark to Vienna, Austria, where OMV is based.

Around the same time, OMV began searching for a system to use for reporting its companies’ environmental compliance and performance. An important new name in the OMV Group, Borealis began searching too. As a major chemical producer, however, its needs were very different than those of the more corporate-oriented OMV. “Borealis is made up of factories and production plants,” explains Tor Aamodt, PhD, Director of International Relations at Emisoft. “They needed a more detailed, operations-oriented system, with greater functionality that would enable them to track precise environmental data and produce operational reports.”

Borealis AG

Established: 1994
Client Since: 2005
Employees: 6,500
Revenue: €7.7 billion
Industry Chemicals
Applications Energy Management, Fuel Management, Emissions to Air Greenhouse, Gas Reporting, Water Management, Discharge to Water, Waste Management Production

“Borealis began with a strong commitment to sustainability and transparency,” says Christopher Zachhuber, Group Expert Environment and Energy – HSE at Borealis.

We needed to track emissions, waste amounts, energy usage and water consumption across all our plants internationally, and we needed the information to be easily accessible and verifiable for audits.”

Emisoft proved to be the ideal environmental compliance management solution. Its core environmental performance and reporting applications support data management and reporting for all environmental compliance topics related to chemical production, and all data and calculations are processed on one powerful, central platform, which ensures traceability, transparency and instant accessibility of data.

“Emisoft gives us a central perspective, where we can see all environmental compliance data and factors, and how variations impact our environmental performance,” says Zachhuber. “It is especially good for audits, as it includes version controls and lets us show exact data for specific dates.

From its beginning, Borealis has been committed to Responsible Care, the chemical industry’s global voluntary initiative for continuous improvement in health, safety and environmental performance. It’s also a member of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and openly presents its dedication to sustainability as part of its company values and identity—all of which means the ability to prove environmental compliance performance with traceable information is of vital importance to Borealis.

“Emisoft helps us fulfil our commitments,” Zachhuber explains. “The sustainability and GRI knowledge of the team and the complete applications in the software help us reach our goals.

Ten years after implementing Emisoft, Borealis uses the environmental management system to coordinate and monitor all its energy and environmental operations.

The inbuilt scalability and flexibility of Emisoft’s environmental compliance management software has enabled it to grow with Borealis, as the company added production plants and developed its product offerings. “Emisoft provides us with an enterprise-wide centralised system for enabling consistent and streamlined environmental compliance, sustainability and reporting processes,” Zachhuber says.

In 2012 Emisoft released a software upgrade, then called TEAMS SR, that enabled automatic environmental data integration between Emisoft and other systems. “That was a huge development—automatic upload makes life much easier,” says Zachhuber. “The updated environmental management system is very powerful, extremely flexible and has lots of tools we now use every day.”

“There are other programs available which do part of what Emisoft can do,” Zachhuber says. “But Emisoft’s environmental management software is more user-friendly and far superior from a service and functionality perspective.

Many other departments within Borealis use a rival environmental management software for accounting and reporting, and occasionally there is an appeal to consolidate all operations to the other platform. But for Zachhuber and his colleagues who rely on Emisoft, it would work against Borealis to embrace that change.

“Emisoft is best because we can rely on it and trust the data and calculations,” he explains. “Our reports, audits and sustainability success depend on Emisoft.”

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