ASK-EHS Engineering & Consultants: making the world better and safer by taking care of the industries' safety issues

Engineering profession comes with its own challenges, of all safety measures are the primary concern. The challenges vary depending upon the nature of the industry such as the requirements of the Oil & Gas sector are different from the Chemical Plants.

Hence, this profession requires the utmost attention to the details and competency to provide safety solutions. All the organizations in the industry are struggling to cope up with safety requirement, and Safety personnel is facing lots of challenges in enforcing the statutory norms and company EHS policies at ground level.

In India, there was a total absence of an integrated service provider that can provide adequate support for Safety implementation to control the accidents.

The industries were facing great challenges like quality EHS training to employees, inadequate Safety Management systems, Conduction of risk assessment and its control measures, Lacking IT/Software platforms to manage the work (PTW, Scaffolding, JHA, Risk assessment, and SMS) and its record keeping and analysis.

The frequency and severity of incidents were getting higher and required competent EHS professional. IT skills of EHS professionals weren't up to date.

The entire chain of management was in dire need of imbibing legal requirements and the ways to fulfill them. After carefully observing such issues, J.K Anand along with Udayan Sharma (EHS) and Rakesh Kansara (IT) came up with an idea to form ASK-EHS Engineering & Consultants in 2008 which would raise a competent cadre of EHS professionals to provide all kinds of EHS support to all types of industries and EHS professionals under one umbrella.

It is a growth partnership and advisory services company helping clients achieve transformational growth through a holistic environment, health and safety (EHS) solutions.

Here are the edited excerpts from the conversation between our editorial team and J.K Anand, Co-founder, and Director of the firm and alumnus of Patna University.

How does it sit within the entrepreneurial ecosystem of India today?

The unique concept of our organization is our strength. We are the only ones in India who has the capability of undertaking complete ownership (Turn-Key Basis) of the management and implementation and monitoring process for all the discipline of EHS.

We render solutions throughout all the phases of all types for industries and have entered into Skill Development in technical trades combining EHS and welfare measures.

We contribute to improving the National Scenario for skillful India encouraging entrepreneurship, generating job opportunities, and shaping skills of the working professional of varied trades and functions. Such preparation helps in attaining high productivity with quality and optimum ROI and along with taking care of the safety, health, and well-being of the people.

The challenges hurled at the firm

Few of the many challenges are;

• Cost Vs Safety: Company always prefers low cost – even at the cost of safety.

• Tendering process in HSE Services: Lowest bid precedes technical evaluation.

• Outsourcing HSE services is still not a common approach in the Asian

• Training the HSE resources in diversified fields.

With such a fast-growing team, how do you make sure everybody stays motivated and how do you support the corporate culture?

ASK-EHS is guided by three young directors equipped with modern progressive ideas believes and follow the principle of Co-operation, Communication, Participation, and Integrated Management System with latest technological inputs.

Method & System, planned working, Co-operative Culture and harmony are visible at every phase which proves to be pillars of our Corporate Culture.

ASK-EHS is a first-generation business rendering following solutions

The recognition

• We have developed and designed a unique EHS Job Portal known as www.ehsengineers.com where more than 40K safety individuals are registered.

• We recruit EHS personnel, up till now have deployed more than12k professionals and have trained more than two lac personnel in various sector and on various safety topics (like NEBOSH IGC, IOG & IOSH, IOSH, scaffolding training, Rigging and many more).

• We have approvals and accreditations from various bodies such as NEBOSH (UK), IOSH (UK) DISH, Govt. of Gujarat, DGFASLI, Construction Skill Development Council of India.

• Swacch Bharat Award given to ASK-EHS for making a short movie on portraying the young mind coming together to support the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan.

• Innov award 2017 given to ASK-EHS for training excellence in the services sector (silver category).

• Exceed award 2018 (Gold) given to ASK-EHS for training excellence (OHS).

• Exceed award 2018 (Silver) given to us for Safety Leadership.

• Reliance training award for outstanding work with them.

Tell us about when you failed. How did you overcome?

Failure depends on the perspectives, failure to convince a client often occurred but failing to deliver never happened.

Our quality services became our strength and eventually led to a good-will in the industry. We didn't let low tender bids by substandard and underqualified competitors come in our way to deliver quality services.

Even progressive clients took a lot of convincing that observance of safety standard quality EHS Services deserves to be paid adequately. After overcoming these failures, we are now an established global quality EHS service provider.

The Clientele

We cater to clients coming from several different verticals including manufacturing, automotive, process industries, information technology and much more, and hence we understand that the needs of our clients are unique.

We gladly faced the challenges in the past and are prepared to present customized solutions to our clients that are modular, scalable and most importantly sustainable for the future. A few prestigious names are

Abu Dhabi Terminals, Aditya Birla Group, Bouygues Construction, Cairn Energy India, Drake & Scull International, Essar projects, Flexsteel Industries, Inc, GMR Energy, Helix Energy Solutions, Innovative Management Consultant, Jurong Engineering, KEC International, Larsen & Toubro Group of Companies, Morgan Advanced Materials, Niko Resources, Pollucon Laboratories, Qatar Steel, Reliance Industries, Samsung Engineering, Tata Motors , Tata Steel, Shell LNG, IOCL, GAIL, HPCL,BPCL, Siemens, ABB , JSW, HCC, Simplex Infra, Utkal Aluminium, Vedanta Group and many more.

What next for the company? What do you see happening in the company industry in 2018-19?

We are already working in the UAE and Malaysia and soon plan to establish our franchise and have a full-fledged office operating by the end of 2019.

The firm believes in the need for a paradigm shift to deal with the understanding and handling of emerging challenges in the areas of Environment, Health & Safety and to look beyond the visible costs of safety-related accidents and look at the larger losses to individuals, organizations, and society.

The firm is poised to deliver solutions with a holistic approach that is easy to implement and achieve immediate results.

What advice can you give to entrepreneurs who want to venture into the same domain in the future?

The scope is going to increase, but in order to compete, the core value lies in the Quality of work, technically thorough with the deployment of qualified and competent human resources who can deliver.