Domain Knowledge Wins: Larry Goldenhersh, CEO of Enviance (Part 2)

Sramana: What does Enviance do?

Larry Goldenhersh: Enviance automates the workflow of environmental data management for compliance purposes, and energy management data for energy conservation purposes. At the highest level we have a cloud-based system that automates data capture, data analysis, task management, dashboards and reporting. We collect a trillion data points a month across our platform for companies like American Electric Power, The DuPont Corporation and Walmart. We collect 70 million data points a month from air, water, waste, emissions, and tasks. We process all of this information to automate the business process of environmental compliance.

Sramana: Would you provide an example of your system automation?

Larry Goldenhersh: Chevron is a customer. We automate air compliance management for them in various locations throughout the world, including the San Joaquin Valley. The traditional compliance business process would be for Chevron to get an air permit that would contain identified assets with corresponding emission limits for those assets. Companies would need to go out and collect emissions data from those assets and take the data back to the office.

They would then open the permit, which is the size of a phone book, because they contain hundreds or thousands of regulations, find the particular asset that was tested and look at the allowable limit. They would then compare the emission value they measured when they tested the asset and compare that to the permit data. If the limit was exceeded, the company would have to send an engineer to fix the equipment. After repairs have been made, then emissions would be tested again to ensure the asset was brought back into compliance. It was an intensively manual process. That was the way environmental compliance was managed, and today there are still many companies that still do this.

To understand the Enviance process, let’s examine a hypothetical pump in a drilling field that has a limit of six pounds of substance per day and requires daily compliance testing. In the Enviance world, the emissions data from this pump is automatically collected. It connects directly to the system and records the emissions data. As soon as the emissions data point hits our system, Enviance automatically looks up the regulatory data to determine the emissions limit and determines if the limit has been exceeded.

If the limit is exceeded, then Enviance automatically sends out notification messages to predetermined individuals and issues the regulatory mandated tasks that are required to bring the pump back into compliance. Each of those tasks has an escalation path. If the task is not done on time by one person it automatically goes to the next. At the end of the day, that compliance professional could press a button and produce a report that cites an exact date and time range that the pump exceeded the regulatory limit, what tasks were issued and accomplished to fix the pump, and how many extra pounds of regulatory substance were emitted.

Sramana: Do the pumps and devices you are talking about already have the APIs to integrate with your system?

Larry Goldenhersh: No, not all of them. Many of them do. Enviance uses an integration manager that we invented in 2005 called Enviance Integration Framework Library, or EIFL. In the Chevron instance, that integration manager is used to connect our Internet-based system with four separate systems that operate in the drilling fields that already receive the automated data collections.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Domain Knowledge Wins: Larry Goldenhersh, CEO of Enviance
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