In any organisation in hazardous industries there are three primary elements; the plant, the people and the interaction between the people and the plant. The interaction of the people with the plant represents millions of man hours per year for the typical organisation and thousands of people every day who routinely intervene in plant operations to do repair and maintenance work. This work often results in the introduction of new hazards, inhibiting safety systems, isolating parts of the plant and interfering with standard operating procedures. The interaction of people on the plant equals operating risk. Therefore it’s not surprising the interaction of the people with the plant is the leading cause of high potential incidents (HiPo’s), second leading cause of fatalities and a significant contributing factor in process safety incidents.
Workforce culture or the people problem is often cited as the cause but is there a deeper underlying issue? Organisations typically have rigorous corporate processes for the plant and the people with systems and data that provide indicators and close the assurance loop. In this way they have operational assurance their policies are being followed and the means and the data to measure status and progress. However, when thousands of people interact with the plant every day to do repair or maintenance work, there are limited systems and often only paper based processes. This leaves a critical gap in the assurance loop with no feedback on performance. Organisations can only judge performance after the event, i.e. with lagging indicators and audit
In other assurance loops, policy is delivered through practices that are embedded in digital systems. The interaction of people with the plant relies on the frontline decision making and adherence to policies and procedures. The gap is only exacerbated when placed against a backdrop of a live process plant where production needs to be maintained, multiple jobs are being managed simultaneously with different hazards and a mix of employees and contractors with varying degrees of experience and competency.
It is a very difficult environment to consistently make the right decisions and adhere to policies with legacy paper based systems. Furthermore, with paper based systems there is no ability to assure that policies are delivered and executed in a consistent manner in operational practice nor is there is any feedback data on performance against standards and operational targets.
Recognising this critical gap in operational assurance, Petrotechnics’ Proscient closes the loop in the riskiest part of operations. The system intelligently embeds corporate, regional and local policies and processes ensuring they are consistently delivered in frontline practice. This provides senior management with insight and oversight over their global frontline operations.
The system captures data as part of routine work processes such as the type of work, volume of work, interaction of work and associated human factors. Common metrics can be established across operations to provide a common indicator of the operational risk associated with the work being performed. For the first time the organisation has the means of understanding the relationship between delivering performance and operational risk. The captured data is then turned into meaningful insight providing clarity and confidence to improve decision making.
Proscient provides senior management 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 while providing the means to measure performance. It is the ideal platform for organisations to further embed a culture of continuous improvement within their operations.