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 facilites 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.

The system is running using the CORVID Applet Runtime in the window below:

How It Works:

The system shown here, is an Exsys CORVID knowledge automation expert system that allows a facility to 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.

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. CORVID runs as a Java applet. Java has very strict security that prevents an applet from writing to the user's computer. While this is necessary to allow Java applets to be safely run, it does prevent an applet from performing some functions that can be desired. The conclusion of an expert system session can be easily displayed in the applet window. However, one function that is frequently needed is the ability to produce a report that can be printed, copied or saved. To do this, CORVID creates a report file on the server that can be displayed in a browser window. The report file can be anything from simple text to a complex document formatted via HTML or RTF.

In this system, the report is built using HTML commands for formatting and is stored on the server for 7 days. The report can only be accessed by the user that originated it. CORVID provides a wide range of options from having the report file deleted immediately after display, to having a report stored indefinitely. Access can be limited to the person that created the report, to a work group, to any one on the Web.