"In today's Oil & Gas market, reputation and quality are everything!" What's the value in Operational Risk & Safety Management
Alexander Pavlović 
Date published: Jun 06, 17
The oil and gas sector has undergone a monumental shift in the past two years, with many firms having to make necessary redundancies to maintain shareholder value and desired profitability figures. Despite the well-documented changes, safety and risk remain at the top table within firms’ business strategies, along with the task of increasing efficiency. Things appear to be picking up again, with confidence gradually rising.
There are a number of self-remedies that oil and gas operators, petrochemical firms and service companies can administer to achieve competitive advantage through process efficiency. Risk is no longer a silo and business unit based task, this is particularly relevant within oil and gas, where a centralised “single source of the truth” is now required to facilitate enhanced marketplace efficiency. This focus on sharing and learning maintains safe practice, demonstrates competency, and highlights areas of particular concern or “blind spots”.
Prevention of undesirable events, risk reduction and shared responsibility for market safety will be key industry drivers for the foreseeable future. Taking an anticipative approach to assessing and reporting on operational risk will help to ensure that the industry can emerge and transform itself into a much stronger position to thrive once again.
The cost of when something goes wrong
Whilst attending the recent HeliOffshore 2017 event in Budapest, it was confirmed by many leaders within the offshore helicopter industry that the ripple effects of an incident typically costs a company a minimum of £2-3 billion.
Slide Deck from HeliOffshore 2017 credit - Andrea Cicero, Babock Mission Critical Services
Lessons learned and the light at the end of the tunnel
Duplication of effort has been highlighted as an area of considerable inefficiency within the Oil & Gas industry ( according to a recent report by PwC, there are savings of up to 15% to be made by streamlining operational business processes). Strong company-wide systems are fundamental to making this change work and to maintain quality management levels.
Recent high-profile safety incidents (such as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) Ruwais refinery fire in January 2017) have highlighted that operational risk should not be looked at retrospectively, and that operators should keep a “finger on the pulse” to avoid undesirable events and become risk conscious, from board level down.
Ideagen works alongside some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies to promote best practice in evolving on a journey from being spreadsheet, SharePoint and silo-based to becoming quality management, safety and operational risk-driven. This normally results in our clients taking a company-wide approach and enhancing how safety and quality reporting and culture is driven from corporate board level.
Rachel Burke, global quality manager at Johnson Matthey, highlights the benefits of achieving superior quality and safety management: "We can diagnose and deal with problems and investigations quickly to prevent recurrence. Recurrence of issues and product non-conformance incurs further cost and has reputational impacts on businesses. In the current climate, where every job is hard fought for, reputation is everything".
With the global energy market continuing to adapt and find innovative solutions to maintaining the industry's reputation as being safety-driven, enhancing this business-wide approach to include quality, safety and efficiency will prove vital in achieving a standing start when the market picks up again.
>> Learn more about how Ideagen's Coruson is helping Johnson Matthey to demonstrate and achieve tight compliance and meet standards
More on Ideagen
Ideagen provides Quality, Safety and Operational Risk Management Software for the world's Petrochemical and Oil & Gas Sectors. Our software provides the technology for the first line of defence around operational uncertainty, safety and quality.
We help some of the world’s largest energy companies to remain compliant with industry standards (such as ISO/TS 29001:2010, ISO9001, ISO14001, local market standards such as COSO Standards). Some of our current clients include the likes of Shell, who use Ideagen’s internal audit tool – Pentana – SABIC, and Fugro in the Middle East market, Johnson Matthey and world-leading aircraft maintenance and engineering firm, HAECO.
Key benefits that Ideagen’s software portfolio include are:
► A "single source of the truth" over a range of existing business processes (Standard Operating Procedures, Document Control, Process Management, CAPA, Audit, Incident Management, Competency Management, Asset Management, Customer Service and Supply Chain).
► Real-time reporting allows early identification of emerging threats to quality - reducing risk and protecting corporate reputation
► Maintaining and building a competitive advantage and help streamline business processes
► User-friendly software that is accessible globally and gives companies the ability to report in real-time.