stakeholder expectation of operational performance continues to rise exponentially and as a result, operational risk management is now firmly ensconced as a board level challenge. Petrotechnics CEO Phil Murray explains how his company's newly launched proscient system can help manage these expectations.
The interaction of people and plant is a key area of focus for corporate governance due to its sheer size, scope and its direct impact on performance, stakeholder expectations and reputational risk. This interaction is the leading cause of HiPo's, second leading cause of fatalities and a significant contributing factor in process safety incidents.
Organisations will typically have rigorous corporate processes for process safety, occupational safety and people management, with systems and data that provide indicators and close the assurance loop. However, when thousands of people interact with the plant every day to do repair or maintenance work, there are limited or no systems and often only paper-based processes. This leaves a large gap in the assurance loop with no feedback on performance. Often these systems, which do not generate or capture data nor provide the means to measure progress outside of look back auditing, are seen as adequate or good enough. In the eyes of stakeholders, is good enough likely to represent a best effort?
Senior management across hazardous industries need to address the challenges of improving operational performance while reducing risk and have the means to measure and demonstrate the organisation's progress.
Traditionally, organisations address the need for continuous improvement through various risk reduction and performance enhancing initiatives, better rulebooks, more robust procedures and new metrics to measure progress. However, more often than not there is neither an increase in performance nor a noticeable decrease in the number of HiPo's, incidents and fatalities.
Despite best efforts to develop, issue and train on best practices and corporate policies, frontline operations have changed very little in the past 40 years. As a result, significant pressure is placed on the shoulders of those who issue and approve work based on a limited paper based system to get day-to-day operational risk right. There is no assurance with systems based on forms in triplicate or basic digitized processes that best practices are shared, lessons learned are delivered contextually and people are guided to the most appropriate decision. What is missing with these systems is data and feedback. Without feedback data on how work is actually carried out, the means to measure performance let alone improve operational performance while reducing risk is unavailable.
Recognising this critical gap in operational assurance, Petrotechnics Proscient closes the loop in the riskiest part of operations, the interaction of people with the plant. The system intelligently embeds corporate, regional and local policies and processes, delivering assurances to senior management by ensuring they are consistently delivered in frontline practice.
By utilising technology to close this loop, data such as type, volume and interaction of work and associated human factors can be captured as part of routine work processes. Common metrics can then be established across operations to provide an indication of the operational risk associated with the work being performed, delivering meaningful insight into frontline operations. The clarity and confidence that this data provides empowers improved decision making at an enterprise, regional or local level.
The real-time visibility of information and meaningful insight in the context of business performance and operational risk provides staff at all levels of the organisation, the necessary operational intelligence to monitor, mitigate or act. For the first time, organisations across hazardous industries have the means of understanding the relationship between delivering performance and operational risk. Functionality of the product includes:
An enterprise platform:
Connect the strategic intent of corporate policy to operational practice.
Enterprise integration capabilities with corporate IT operations infrastructure, such as maintenance management systems, planning systems, ERP and HSE systems.
Flexibility to ensure corporate, regional and local standards are operationalised.
Dynamic tools:
Work conflict detection improves decision making.
Real-time risk profiles of the plant.
Operational intelligence:
Common risk and efficiency indices for the enterprise, assets and plants providing real governance over operational activity.
Optimise operations with integrated business analytics capabilities.
Phil Murray is CEO of Petrotechnics, the company he founded in 1989 to use technology as an enabler to intelligently automate frontline oil & gas industry work processes. He has a BSc in mechanical engineering from the University of Salford and previously worked internationally for BP for 10 years in technical, operational and managerial roles.Managing down risk
Operators can bolster their drive to improve performance and leverage new and often unconventional fields through the deployment of operational performance and predictive risk systems. Senior management now have the tools to not only address the way operations are set up across the enterprise, but to ensure and vastly improve upon how the work is executed on a day-to-day basis. Having the right information at hand empowers structured decision making with the direct impact being the ability to reduce risk, better optimise work and improve overall performance. Policies and processes can be optimised and improved based on real data and meaningful insight ensuring the organisation's strategic intent is linked to the execution of its critical business processes and improvement initiatives.
Proscient makes activity centric data available in a way that changes the way organisations in hazardous industries can use information to drive transformational change, discovery, and innovation. Frontline workers are provided with rigorous processes and practical, critical information relevant to the work that they are about to undertake. This in turn delivers assurance that corporate policies are being followed in routine practice and measures how these policies impact performance. There is the ability to aggregate this performance data and establish an index for both risk and efficiency for the enterprise, asset and plant. Senior management can then use these indices to manage and monitor the whole organisation to a less risky and more efficient performance.
Organisations can now have the peace of mind that key policies, procedures and regulations are in practice ensuring compliance, and demonstrating that it is actually working towards the company's objectives and senior management has the leading indicators for a key operational risk area, the interaction of people with the plant. OE
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