Using New Technology To Ensure Corporate Standards Compliance and Lower Operational Risk

With rising stakeholder expectations on performance, hazardous industries face substantial pressure to deliver sustainable operational improvements, and drive safety beyond mere compliance. Post Macondo, many organisations are reviewing and strengthening corporate policies and management systems to properly handle risk in their operations. The ability for these organizations to drive such initiatives through is a complex and time consuming challenge that goes far beyond rewriting procedures or improving training. More often than not there is no noticeable decrease in the number of HiPO’s, incidents and fatalities and the continuing challenge of effective engagement with the frontline remains. 

In this paper we will focus on the area where risk management decisions are made daily - front line work execution. Intervention is recognised as the biggest operational risk. It is the leading cause of HiPo’s and second leading cause of fatalities. Since it involves people, equipment, tools, procedures and typically live plant, the need for Operational Discipline is paramount to drive safety primarily, but also the efficient use of resources. Yet, as an industry we typically still manage this critical business process with paper.

Paper systems provide no data and without data there is no effective and scalable manner to manage day to day frontline operational risk. While many of the existing control systems, like permit to work provide some value, they only manage each job or task as a single unrelated point of activity.  These paper forms and certificates are viewed individually and not collectively or holistically, rendering it difficult to understand combined data and lagging indicators. As a result, management has little visibility, oversight or control on the potential cumulative risk of frontline work.

Inevitably, scarcity of cumulative risk and lagging data prevents generation of leading indicators which is key to the effective management of operational risk. Cumulative risk profiles and lagging data can only be delivered through technology. We will demonstrate how to convert the millions of man hours per year derived from thousands of people every day routinely intervening in plant operations to do repairs, maintenance, and interfering with standard operating procedure, into useful management data.

More effective tools are needed to ensure the actions of people at the frontline align with corporate best practices and in order to provide frontline personnel with the necessary real time support in order to make the daily decisions demanded in the dynamic world of operations.

Given the complexity of global organizations in our industry today, many of which have grown through acquisition, aligning to standard practices is a recognised challenge. The traditional Operational Discipline approaches rely on developing a culture of conformance coupled with a stronger management system. Whilst this approach has significant merit it has lacked suitable supporting tools to help align practices whilst providing data on performance and generally improved surveillance.

This paper will show how technology can play an integral role in guiding and structuring decision making by ensuring safety rules, best practices and lessons learned are deeply embedded into operational processes for frontline workers and management. In this way, risk controls and guidance can take shape outside of the ‘rule book’ and become an integral part of routine operations. Work execution data can be captured thus providing a window into how well frontline operational risks are being managed.

The aggregation of data across an organization can provide enhanced lagging indicators and improved organizational knowledge.  Reviewing lagging data can help to develop leading indicators, thus moving from ‘fix and find’ to a culture of ‘predict and prevent’, where operational insight can be viewed from frontline to the boardroom.

We will demonstrate how new technology platforms can drive a culture of conformance as well as establishing  new methods of tracking performance in real time. Using practical examples, we will explore some of the historical models for managing work at the front line and look at how technology has changed them over the past 10 years. In addition, we will look at some of the gaps which still exist in these business processes and highlight how new technology solutions can bridge these gaps and generate the necessary data to provide real time surveillance and feedback for all levels of the organization. Finally, we will review powerful new performance measures which will dramatically change our ability to implement operational risk management in this space and compare them to conventional PSM and Personal Safety indicators.