That's the belief that gave birth to India's unique company mySetu that provides solutions and tools to organizations and enterprises to deal with critical issues related to environment, health and safety norms
MUMBAI, INDIA: In this interview, Amit Patel, mySetu's managing director and chief strategy officer, talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News on the company's uniqueness and experience of dealing with organizations on environment 
sustainability, its awareness and challenges in making clients understand in investing in solutions for environment and safety standards
CIOL: mySetu is among very few companies in India that have developed solutions and tools to address the key aspect of Environmental, Health and Safety Management Systems (EHS&S) across enterprises and organizations. Can you brief us on how those automated software solutions and tools help companies deal with environment, health and safety related issues?
Amit Patel: We are the only Indian company in EHS&S domain with almost a decade of interaction with Indian corporates. We believe in ‘What gets measured, gets managed’ and in our experience, first step for performance improvement in any sector is to define KPI’s to measure the existing performance.
The next step is to identify the gap areas to assess the current performance, which involves benchmarking against comparable units such as competitors, also within the organizational units, etc.
mySetu Suites and Systems is advance comprehensive tool in EHS&S domain, which enables organizations to proactively manage Environment, Health, Safety & Sustainability information and performance from an individual facility level to a global enterprise level. It addresses organizational challenges of process control and compliance more efficiently and accurately.
To illustrate, let's consider a very simplistic example. An organization needs to report its accident data to regulators within a certain time limit from time of accident. Using mySetu module, management can set up an automated process of lodging accident data online in mySetu system.
Responsible employees such as plant manager/safety officer can access accident data from various locations and prepare form to be filed to regulator using mySetu system. Online filing and reminder for time limit can also be set.
Top management can also access fatality data instantaneously and can immediately take actions to control it.
CIOL: Your company is 7 years old, so given this short journey, can you share your experience in terms of dealing with customers and clients. What's the level of awareness you see among Indian organizations when it comes to environment, health and safety aspects? And how large is the market for EHS&S in India?
Amit Patel: We get regular feedbacks from the industry and awareness is definitely there. In discussion with one of our clients, it came up that their boardroom talks start with accidents and environment data.
There are multitudes of reasons that seriousness towards the cause has increased. Some of the global companies are setting the norms and their Indian counterparts are enthusiastically following/replicating it.
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Also global ambitions of Indian companies are increasingly putting them at world level for scrutiny and organizations are realizing the need to contain their EHS&S risks. Further awareness on a general ground has encouraged organizations to monitor their substandard practices.
Awareness and market size has increased substantially but still it is miniscule as compared to world market and global practices.
CIOL: In recent years, due to external factors like non-profit bodies, media and government regulators there has been some push towards environment consciousness and sustainability. However, in spite of such external factors, what kind of challenges do you face with potential customers or making them understand the core importance of EHS&S for their businesses?
Amit Patel: EHS&S practice is still a compliance to an average organization and one question such as ‘Why should we spend X amount for safety’ still crop-up in some of the discussions.
We confer them to practice Sustainability for employees with environment as a core theme for development, which would not only help in meeting the compliance but also would provide long term benefits in terms of cost savings, innovation and market image.
Explaining return of investment in EHS&S space is difficult as there are non-quantifiable returns and saleability of long term returns has been difficult in the Indian scenario till now.
CIOL: In terms of clients, how many IT organizations have deployed mySetu solutions and tools? Which business verticals are high on adoption of EHS&S in India?
Amit Patel: Till now none of the IT organizations have deployed our solution. We have clients in FMCG, Chemical, Cement, Power and Automotive domain. FMCG companies were early on adoption of EHS&S.
For Oil & Gas sector safety is of paramount importance and they have done well after some accidents in the last decade.
Currently, firms in core sector including coal, crude oil, natural gas, fertilizers, petroleum refinery products, electricity, cement and steel are increasingly paying attention and managing EHS&S.
