Focus Environmental, Inc., established in 1988, specializes in providing process engineering, and regulatory compliance services in the areas of hazardous waste thermal treatment, air permitting, air pollution control, contaminated soil remediation and hazardous waste management.  In addition, Focus provides regulatory, compliance and engineering services to the FDA regulated industries.   Focus has successfully completed over 1000 projects for over 400 clients in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Puerto Rico. 

Their staff is primarily composed of individuals with degrees in chemical, civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering along with professional degrees in the fields of biology, chemistry, and environmental science.  Many have advanced degrees and over half have professional registrations (Professional Engineer or Engineer-in-Training).  "We average over 20 years of engineering experience per employee and almost all staff members have practical experience in chemical or industrial plant operations," said David Pitts, a Focus Environmental partner.   

Focus and Alinion are working together to provide integrated service solutions to industries facing either FDA or environmental management regulatory requirements.  “Alinion Sentinel offers us the ability to provide packaged, but client-customized solutions that fully leverage our internal domain expertise and enables us to enter new markets,” Pitts says.  “We can go into a prospective client and demonstrate how we can implement a program for them quickly and efficiently while offering them best practice solutions based on the expertise of our team.”   Because of its relationship with Alinion, Focus is now targeting manufacturing organizations that need to overcome the cost and operating burdens created by meeting environmental regulatory mandates such as Title V, SARA and managing Material Safety Data Sheets.  In addition, Pitts says Focus can also leverage its ISO expertise directly into on-going management solutions for ISO 9001 and 14001, the international standards for manufacturing and environmental management.  

Pitts says Focus has noticed that companies often times struggle with the impact that the vast amount of regulatory issues have on their day-to-day business operations.  According to Pitts, “companies truly want to comply with the letter of the law, when dealing with regulation and standards.  Many of the solutions companies have purchased solve only a very specific aspect of compliance.  When they try to extend the use of those systems to other issues, they find serious limitiations in meeting their requirements.”   With Alinion Sentinel, Pitts said organizations can better manage a wide range of compliance issues from a single platform. 

Pitts adds that “most companies do not have one requirement; they have multiple requirements. With Sentinel, Focus can now offer an integrated and comprehensive solution for improving how organizations manage compliance with regulatory requirements and standards, frequently for less than the price of a full-time employee.”  

Pitts says that Alinion Sentinel makes it easy for a consulting organization to offer expanded services to existing and new clients. “Sentinel is a management framework that has been designed specifically to fully represent our intellectual property to clients. When we bring Sentinel to a client, it showcases our best practices and methods for managing and monitoring compliance. With Sentinel, not only do clients get our best thinking, but they get the industry’s most comprehensive and best solution for managing processes and documents on a daily basis.”