(75b) Using New Technology to Ensure Corporate Standards Compliance and Improved Frontline Operational Risk Management

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.

Better tools are needed to ensure the actions of people at the frontline align with corporate best practices and that these people have the necessary real time support for 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 new technology platforms can transform the implementation and enforcement of a culture of conformance as well as establishing  new methods of tracking performance in real time.

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. 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.

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.