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What are Environmental Permits?
Environmental permits are legal documents that outline specific obligations your business must meet to protect air, water, and land. They can range from just a few pages to hundreds, often containing thousands of requirements that make compliance time-consuming and complex. Extracting, tracking, and updating these obligations can be overwhelming—and any oversight can result in serious non-compliance risks.
How Can SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Help
Imagine skipping the manual extraction of the obligations and all that tedious typing when creating permits and tasks. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it’s not.
With the latest feature of SAP Environment, Health, and Safety, you can create permits right from your existing documents, delegate responsibilities through tasks, and stay on track with automated escalations and email notifications. Instead of wrestling with stacks of paperwork, you can focus on the real compliance work that moves your business forward.
How It Works
In the My Permits app you can upload a PDF file, which will display alongside the permit creation form. This allows you to copy the relevant text directly into the required fields. For tasks, it’s just as easy: use the Manage Compliance Requirements app to upload the PDF and simply select whatever text you need.
Example Scenario
Let’s say you are an environmental manager at a business location and have just received a newly issued environmental permit. Your job is to ensure that the business at the location stays in compliance with the obligations stated in the permit. Let’s see how we can ease that process.
Start with the Permit
Your first task is to create the permit in the system.
In the My Permits app, select Create from Document and upload a PDF file—your trusty reference document.
The file appears right next to the permit creation form, so you can easily copy the relevant details into the form’s fields.
Where Did the PDF Go?
After you create the permit, you’re redirected to the Edit Compliance Requirements app. Head over to the Documents tab, and there it is—the PDF file that you used to create the permit, ready for reference.
Need to add more files? Just select Add File and upload any additional PDFs you might need.
Let’s Create Some Tasks
To start creating some compliance tasks, navigate to the Tasks tab and choose Manage Tasks.
After selecting Choose Document, you’ll be able to see all the documents you previously uploaded in the Documents tab. Select the file you want and click Continue.
The file will open in the side-by-side viewer. Here’s where it gets really convenient:
Hover over a paragraph and select it or manually highlight text from the document. Then choose the Create Task button that pops up.
Choose your task type and you’ll see the task creation form. The text from the document that you selected is automatically filled in the Description field. Fill in all the relevant information, click Create and you're done!
At the bottom of the form, you’ll find the Document section, which shows the name of the PDF file and the exact page where the text came from. This way, you always know where the details of the task originated.
Rinse and Repeat
Want to create more tasks? Navigate back to the side-by-side viewer and repeat the process as many times as you need.
To stay on top of everything, paragraphs you’ve already used to create tasks will be highlighted in blue. Tasks that are overdue stand out in red. And those that are done or canceled are shown in green.
Manual entry? That's so last version. Welcome to the future of getting things done.
