It’s the start of a new year, and the VIM Technologies team couldn’t be more excited. Many of us have made our New Year’s Resolutions and are on our way to making changes in the ways we live and work, and how we impact our surroundings. If you haven’t already, it’s time to start thinking about New Year’s Resolutions for yourself and your air compliance initiatives. We’ve pulled together our top five ideas to help improve your air compliance program and quality of work life while you’re at it…
1. Be Open to New Ideas and Transformations
Being open-minded helps with your personal life and relationships, but also your business operations. The ability to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things will lead you to new opportunities and improved results. Just because it has worked for the past 20 years, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an optimal solution. Simply taking the time to understand the latest technologies, trends and associated best practices can give you a good idea if there is room for improvement.
Digital transformation is one of the hottest movements and for good reason, it is rapidly improving operations across a variety of facilities in practically all industries. Industry leaders are taking this beyond operations and significantly enhancing their environmental programs through improved efficiency, transparency and employee experience leading to cost savings, risk reduction, even increasing their competitive advantage.
2. Audit Your Habits and Processes
Self-reflection is a great exercise for evaluating your habits and reassessing if they’re adding value to your life and wellbeing. Applying this to your air monitoring program is an excellent idea since many programs are established then put on autopilot and not reassessed as often as they should be. Auditing your Air Monitoring Program every couple of years will help ensure that you’re managing your air compliance data properly. With the ever-changing EPA legislation and advancements in technology, it is wise to consider a 3rd party firm that specializes in both the EPA, state, and local regulations along with the latest monitoring technologies available. The VIM Technologies COMPAS group specializes in these very audits and can help ensure you are on the best path to compliance.
3. Recognize What You Have
Appreciating where you are in life and what you have is something we can all do more of. Similarly, know what you have when you’ve invested in a product or service. CEMLink6 for example is constantly rolling out updates and new features such as the new Message Board, Text alerts with PDF attachments (alarms or reports), and an updated Scheduler with automation options to handle sending tasks to team members. It’s a great idea to review the release notes when they come out to see what updates and enhancements are included in the latest version. If you need to brush up on all of the features of CEMLink6, VIM Technologies offers an assortment of training courses and webinars introduction training course that would be helpful.
4. Stay Safe
Staying safe has been the mantra for many of us since the pandemic began in 2020. Unfortunately, those with more nefarious intentions have seized their opportunity to capitalize on this situation. Recent spikes in cyber-attacks put your information at risk. Fortunately, CEMLink6 offers a number of backup options to help protect your coveted air compliance data from these unanticipated situations. We all know that backing up configuration and database files are important, but also are the intervals at which they are backed up and the locations these backups are stored. A daily back up to your local hard drive is a start, but for a sound night of sleep, you should have multiple backup routines of various intervals being stored in multiple locations.
If your Data Acquisition System (DAS) is on a network, which it likely is, then identifying additional locations to house the backup data should be easy. Mapping a backup destination and interval within CEMLink is simple when using the Scheduler feature. Now that you have multiple backups actively scheduled, CEMLink will communicate with you via the alarms interface if a backup fails to complete. While this alarm may seem like a nuisance, it could save you from a loss of data. If your IT department is handling backups, it might be a good idea to have them confirm the process exists and show you where the files are stored to give you peace of mind.
5. Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst
Worst may be an exaggeration, but disaster recovery for yourself or your company is likely one topic that may not get the planning it deserves. Speak with VIM experts on establishing or updating your disaster recovery plan for your environmental air compliance data. This could be as simple as confirming your backup routine and destination files, but often leads to more extensive safeguards like migrating systems to virtual machines, upgrading outdated PC and PLC equipment, and ensuring the essential spare parts are onsite. Our experienced support team can help navigate through the necessary options to meet your needs. Upgrading to a virtual machine-based DAS could be easier than you think, and we can help you discuss the transition with your IT teams. Also, some Allen Bradley and Modicon PLCs in use have been declared obsolete by their manufacturers, and we can help you decide on the best options when updating to more modern offerings.
There you have it – five concrete resolutions you can add to your list for personal or professional development. If your team needs help taking full advantage of all the features of CEMLink6, or if you still need to upgrade, please contact our sales team so that we can put you on the best path in 2022.
