ENFOS ROI: Environmental Remediation Obligations

The Business Case for ENFOS for ERO Management

Environmental remediation obligations create significant financial and operational burdens for companies as they work to simultaneously manage substantial long-term liabilities while navigating complex regulatory requirements. Property owners often struggle with the uncertainty of remediation costs, which can escalate unpredictably due to evolving site conditions, changing regulatory standards, and inefficient project management approaches. At the same time, the administrative burden of managing a portfolio of liabilities and projects while controlling the budget and the spend is often exacerbated by the use of disconnected systems and manual processes. Hobson & Company, a leading research firm focused on Return on Investment (ROI) studies, worked with ENFOS, a leader in environmental obligation management software, to explore these challenges and learn how industry leaders are responding. Hobson & Company conducted independent research consisting of in-depth interviews with ENFOS customers and found that ENFOS addressed specific customer challenges to deliver a quick and compelling ROI.

In five years, customers typically experience a200-400% return on their investment

The impact of ENFOS is not only strategic but measurable. Based on this analysis, a company spending approximately $46m per year on remediation with 4 FTEs managing the portfolio, 4 FTEs managing budgeting and accounting, a 25% historical annual overforecast of spend (short-term liability), and a 10% annual unplanned budget overage would pay back the cost of ENFOS in 5.8 months and generate a 5-year ROI of 232%.

Challenges for managing Environmental Remediation Obligations

Customers interviewed for this study noted that there are consistent challenges in optimally managing ERO liabilities. Below is a list of some of the most universal concerns.

Managing Large Portfolios

Using disjointed systems such as spreadsheets and shared drives creates a significant administrative burden for project managers, financial analysts, and environmental teams. Relying on multiple point solutions creates challenges in forecasting, budgeting, and tracking proposals and vendor payments

Optimizing Financial Performance

Organizations struggle to gain real-time visibility into project performance when there are no standardized methods for spend controls or a consistent review of projections. Budgets are often exceeded, and over-projections of spend are common for the industry.

Impacting Business Value

Customers noted that poor visibility into reserves vs. spend drives volatile cash-efficiency metrics. Without a unified platform to manage the entire ERO lifecycle, the efficiency of spend in reducing the reserve is limited.

Customer research identified six benefits of ENFOS across three key business objectives: Increase Operational Efficiencies | Optiimize Performance | Mitigate Financial Risk

Increase Operational Efficiencies

Reduce administrative burden of managing portfolio and spend

ENFOS is a purpose-built enterprise SaaS platform and system of record for Environmental Obligations. It centralizes all project data, including sites, vendors, documents, financial plans, costs, and regulatory info into one auditable platform. End-to-end workflow automation cuts admin overhead, strengthens financial accountability, and preserves institutional knowledge.

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“ENFOS decreased our overhead and our administrative costs and allowed us to focus our time and be able to report, visualize, and extract data. Previously, we didn’t have tallies on how much work we authorized for the various consultants. Now we can track by vendor, by project, by business on how much spend is authorized, how much money has been committed through POs, and how money has been spent out of those POs.”
‍- Director, Remediation Services

Reduce time managing forecasts, budgets and reserve accounting

ENFOS gives CFOs, CAOs, and remediation teams full oversight by linking forecasts and budgets to actual spend. Real-time performance tracking automates measurement, adjustments, and recognition, ensuring accurate, reconciled reserves. ERP integration adds traceability, audit readiness, and SOX-compliant reporting.

"ENFOS links to our ERP which gives us real-time information to do forecasts. Without ENFOS, we would have to create our own ad-hoc schedules, do manual analysis to check the data, create budgets, ensure we don’t go over budget, and maintain our internal control environment, all of which would add at least 3 FTEs to our existing 5 FTEs.”
‍- CFO

Reduce time responding to audits

ENFOS streamlines audits with built-in controls, automated logs, audit trails, and decision support packages that align with FASB, IASB, and SOX standards. It delivers accurate, audit-ready financials for Environmental Obligations, reducing risk, shortening reporting cycles, and increasing confidence with auditors, regulators, and investors.

"ENFOS ensures that all audit controls are locked down so we can run an audit log. The process is well documented, and the consultants add their own information. Because of this, we had zero questions from auditors last year, despite our 250% growth in the number of sites.” - Senior Manager, Environmental Finance

Optimize Performance

Reduce unplanned budget overages

ENFOS enforces a robust financial control framework that aligns project spend with approved budgets and contracts. By automating vendor controls and standardizing change orders, it eliminates unauthorized work, improves cost predictability, and provides real-time visibility into scope, rates, and budget variances, ensuring fiscal discipline.

"Prior to using ENFOS, there wasn't a correlation between what the liability was vs. the spend vs. what we had asked or authorized the consultant to do. So ENFOS allowed us to bring it all together and more tightly control budgets. ENFOS reduces surprises to almost 0.”
- Senior Director Environment

Increase working capital by reducing over-forecasting

ENFOS improves forecasting and control of Environmental Obligations, reducing excess reserves and unnecessary spend. This frees up capital for growth, operations, and higher-ROI uses.

"Using ENFOS, we focused on our short-term projections to improve our ERO spending over-projections. Ultimately, we were able to go from 23% over projecting per year to 11% for a 6-month projection. We were able to tighten up our projections and become much more efficient with our spending. As a result, the excess projection reserves can now be spent on capital improvements or investments.”
- Remediation Manager

Mitigate Financial Risk

Improve cash efficiency

ENFOS improves cash efficiency by aligning liability retirements with financial plans. It baselines and tracks obligations to manage spend against the reserve, reducing volatility and ensuring spend directly lowers reserves with minimal increases.

"We have a 100% improvement in our cash efficiency from using ENFOS. ENFOS gives us the visibility to see where we’re spending our money, on which projects, how much we're spending, etc. Before it was a black hole and we had no idea.”
- Remediation Manager

"We compare data all the time, and we're always either driving for a better result or earlier closure. We're able to make better decisions, quicker, using the data that we extract from ENFOS. It makes us utilize our reserve dollars better and improve our cash efficiency.”
- Director Environmental Health and Safety

Key Findings

Research Results

The value of a managed environmental remediation obligation platform is immediate and demonstrable. For this case study, the financial impact of ENFOS is represented by a company spending approximately $46m per year on remediation with 4 FTEs managing the portfolio, 4 FTEs managing budgeting and accounting, and a 25% historical annual overforecast of spend (short-term liability), and a 10% annual unplanned budget overage.

About ENFOS

ENFOS is a purpose-built enterprise SaaS platform that serves as the system of record for EnvironmentalObligations (EO) at many of the world’s largest industrial companies. With over 25 years of domain expertise,ENFOS empowers CFOs with complete financial oversight of these EOs by integrating long-term forecasting, spend management, and subledger accounting. The platform ensures enterprise-wide compliance with FASB, IASB, and SOX requirements while delivering accurate, audit-ready financials for 10-Q and 10-K reporting—reducing risk, streamlining reporting cycles, and increasing confidence among auditors, regulators, and investors.

About Hobson & Company

‍Hobson & Company helps technology vendors and purchasers uncover, quantify, and validate the key sources of value driving the adoption of new and emerging technologies. Our focus on robust validationhas helped many technology purchasers more objectively evaluate the underlying business case of a new technology, while better understanding which vendors best deliver against the key value drivers. For additional information, please visit www.hobsonco.com.

Disclaimer: The Return-on-Investment (ROI) and other financial calculations performed by this tool are based on dataprovided by ENFOS customers and various assumptions and estimates only. The actual ROI realized bycustomers may vary from the estimates provided. ENFOS offers this tool to assist customers with evaluating environmental obligation managementsolutions; however, ENFOS and Hobson & Company (thefirm that created the tool) are not responsible for theaccuracy of any estimates.