ISO 14001 - Compliance with environmental regulations is an increasingly complex part of doing business. ISO 14001 defines specific requirements and actions that a company must take to meet the standards. Compliance with ISO 14001 may be required for some contracts and can have very significant financial benefits for the company.

The company that developed this system used an approach of having multiple levels of compliance - a Level 2 which covers a subset of the full standard and is mandatory for all facilities. This can optionally be followed by Level 1 which is compliance with the full standard and which requires an actual on-site audit that lasts about a week to make sure that the factory is in full compliance with requirements.

For a large company with many sites worldwide, mandating that all facilities meet Level 2 can be a major task. It can be difficult to provide required education and then appraise the facilities to determine that they have met the standard. One approach is mandatory training and a large appraisal/enforcement group. That is costly and can produce an adversarial relationship.

How It Works - The system shown here, is an Exsys Corvid knowledge automation expert system that allows a facility do perform a detailed self-appraisal for Level 2 compliance. This informs facility management of their status and any steps that they may need to take to achieve the required level of compliance. Headquarters' resources are made available to solve specific problems. If the facility wishes, and has met all of the Level 2 requirements, they are well on their way to reaching Level 1.

The system produces a detailed report on the status of the facility and the actions that need to be taken to achieve Level 2 compliance. Since a facility can determine if it meets the required level of compliance and take any necessary actions before any type of formal audit, the audit changes from an enforcement function to one that assists the facility.

This expert system was developed by one of the worlds largest manufacturing companies. The company has a policy of not directly endorsing any specific products and can not be named, but has allowed demonstration of a version of the system with information that would identify the company removed.

Reports - In addition to demonstrating a good use for expert system technology, this system also shows how Exsys Corvid can produce HTML reports that can be printed and saved. Both the Corvid Servlet Runtime and Corvid Applet Runtime support the creation of text, HTML, RTF and PDF reports. Reports can be dynamically built, stored on the server and displayed to the end user in their Browser window via HTML. When RTF or PDF reports are used, the browser program will pass them on to the program associated with that type of file - typically MS Word for RTF and Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF files.