This week we launched our first Coffee and Compliance episode of 2021! To kick off our series for the new year, we invited our guest speaker, Nikhita Jingar, an Environmental Engineer at Graniterock, to share her perspective on the Building Materials Industry and Environmental Compliance.
Nikhita graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering with a Focus in Water Resources and Environmental Engineering from Santa Clara University. After landing a position as an environmental engineer with Graniterock, she quickly learned that a role in environmental compliance focused heavily on regulations and policy, opposite to her engineering and designing background. However, with the skills she developed in her academic career, she has successfully researched, interpreted, and applied her knowledge of environmental regulations and policy within the environmental compliance program at Graniterock.
In her role at Graniterock, Nikhita takes on a managerial position, overseeing and providing environmental support to personnel at four industrial sites. This role includes answering compliance related questions, addressing daily business operations, and educating personnel on how their business operations tie into environmental policies.
”With her responsibility of overseeing environmental compliance at four of Graniterock’s industrial sites, Nikhita has fully implemented Mapistry to not only create accountability among site personnel, but to develop an understanding of each individual facility’s operations. With a bit of onboarding, training, and walk-throughs, Nikhita is proud to say that site personnel are very comfortable using Mapistry and have started to take full accountability for their roles in environmental compliance.
Nikhita and her team, utilize the main environmental compliance dashboard the most to receive an overview of inspection completion status, tasks creation trends, and to note users assigned to current or upcoming tasks. Nikhita and her team have successfully made the transition from paper to electronic and Mapistry continues to be a big success story for them!
In our discussion with Nikhita, we learned that aspects in both environmental compliance and in the Building Materials industry are changing everyday. Nikhita’s advice to those of you working within this industry: Be open to change. Nikhita expresses that being open to change and to learning new things within the industry is an important skill to have to successfully understand what policies apply to your business and how they will impact your operations. Lastly, Nikhita emphasizes being familiar with communicating key principles to a broader audience to ensure full understanding of what needs to be done from both a regulatory and business standpoint.