3 Critical HSE and HAZOP Management Competencies

There are three critical competencies that make HAZOP studies more efficient and effective. Unfortunately many HAZOP teams don’t meet these competencies.

3 Critical HSE and HAZOP Management Competencies

Today we’re going to talk about the three critical HSE and HAZOP competencies. We’re going to take a look at a traditionally labor intensive, uncontrolled process and change the game a little bit by adding three critical competencies that will increase accuracy, visibility, follow up times, accountability, and trackability of your HSE and HAZOP studies.

These are all really important things to have when health, safety could be on the line. You want to make sure that your process is as tight as possible, because health and safety are so important from moral, social and economic standpoints. The market demands that you have sound HSE practices. Clients demand it. The industry demands it. The government demands it. The people at large demand it. It’s for this reason that HSE and HAZOPS are very important things to think about and have completely under control.

ProjecTools HSE is for oil and gas, EPC, and engineering companies who are dissatisfied with the traditional HSE and HAZOP management system, which, as it turns out for a lot of folks, aren’t really systems at all. Rather, they’re using emails and spreadsheets that get unruly and don’t promote teamwork or automation.

The idea is to give you a confident stable HSE and HAZOPS management system that will get your teams working together, automate your work flows and your tracking, reporting, and followup. It will stop all the vicious cycles of dealing with revision issues, guarding spreadsheets under lock and key, having no visibility into your process and having team members circumventing the agreed upon HSE and HAZOPS workflows. Ultimately, it’s going to help you down the path to improving safety and reliability of assets and what you’re building and what you’re designing, without having to manage every little process and spend nice weekends in the office organizing and auditing what people have done and the path that information flows through. Let’s get into some of the problems.

As soon as we start talking about HSE problems, something jumps into my mind. It makes me think of a client that we have, Carl. Carl is HSE coordinator for an oil and gas, EPC project. He saw that there was a grayed out button in his company’s ProjecTools instance. He called us up about it to figure out what it was all about. In that conversation he was telling us about the issues he was having, how much time he was wasting and how unbelievably frustrated he was. He was saying the people on his team were breaking the workflow they agreed upon. The email chains and the spreadsheets that he was relying upon were being compromised.

Carl had actually come back from vacation and his HSE tracking spreadsheet had turned into seven tracking worksheets. It was unclear what changed while he was gone. He didn’t know who made the changes and why they made the changes and so forth. He was really worried that he didn’t have the latest revision. It appeared that while he was out, his staff made various updates to his spreadsheet and just kept “saving as.” It took him quite a while to straighten it out and a long time to get the process back under control.

After diving into those issues that he was having, he wanted to know what our HSE and HAZOP app could do for him. After showing him the application, and how to import data and set up the app and the players and the workflows and then after some basic imports, setup and training, his staff was using the application within a couple days.

They haven’t looked back. They don’t use email based workflows. They don’t use spreadsheets. They can report on everything they do. They always know what’s the recommendations are. They don’t have to track anything down and have off on conversations to figure out what happened. It’s all here. We, basically, completely solved his problems that he was having

Let’s take a look at those three critical competencies of HSE and HAZOP management.

The first one is, use HSE workflows. You got to have a workflow that’s optimized for your industry and what you’re building and how your organization is set up.

The second thing is integrating your HSE and HAZOP stakeholders. Bring in everybody who might be working from different offices across the globe, bringing them together so they can work together better. This does not mean using emails to transfer emails back and forth and complete studies. That is definitely not what I mean. I means having an online system that accommodates your global team’s partners, clients and contractors. This shouldn’t involve spreadsheets, which are unreliable and really confusing when you have multiple people working in them.

The third thing is maintaining accountability. How you do that is with task based workflows, reporting ability, various types of reports that are going to support the HSE and HAZOP management process.

Let’s take a look at each one of these. We’ll talk about them for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll get into the application and I’ll show you just a quick snapshot of what we do and how we support the efficient and effective completion of HAZOPS. Really, what I want to give you guys today is an idea of how to use these critical competencies to improve our HSE and HAZOP management process.

First we’ll talk about workflows. What we’re looking at here is a very simple internal workflow. Your HSE admin sends out a study. It goes to responsible party. It goes to a reviewer who can reject it. If it’s accepted it can be passed on to the approver who can either reject it or accept it and it’s closed. This is very simple. For a lot of studies, this will work great. You need more than that. Let’s take a look at how we can build on this workflow. I’m really showing you these things because you should be able to document exactly what your workflow looks like. Then you should enforce that workflow. You use the same workflow every time. You can report on that workflow. It’s just something you can’t do with emails.

Taking a look here at this second workflow. It’s basically the same workflow, but the approver can say, “Yeah, it needs more work, but I agree in principal.” It goes back and kind of repeats the same thing with the notes, adding evidence and so forth. The third workflow is very important. This is where having your house in order really can benefit you. It’s when you have to add your clients. Here’s a whole HSE workflow that will pretty much work for any HSE/HAZOP study. The typical workflow with the agreed on principal, if it needs more clarification, and then sending to a client. You might follow this workflow anyway. It’s not enforced and it’s not delivered to the client with all of the comments wrapped up in a nice, neat package, it could be confusing. If you send it out in an email and it is confusing, you guys are going to look JV. They’re going to wonder, “How solid is this process if what they’re giving us is something that’s sub-par?” Anyway, if you’re going to include your clients in your HSE workflow, you got to have it in order. Make it task based. Pay attention to the next couple slides.

The second critical competency is integrating your stakeholders. How you do this is you have an online system that uses task based workflows. I’ll say it again. Online system with task based workflows for integrating your teams, partners, contractors and clients. A great example of this is our application ProjecTools. All of these users log in and as the studies make their way through the workflow, they get tasks on their homepage right where they log in to the application. When they see they have a task, or if they get an email notification saying, “Hey, you have a task,” they’ll log in and they complete the task. They don’t have to go digging for the supporting documents. They don’t have to read down through thirty emails bounced back and forth between the folks. They can see a nice, neat, concise history and all the things that they need to complete their review approvals, suggestion, whatever it is, wherever it’s at in the process.

What the online system offers is consistent presentation of information, clear communication of the expectations. Is this a review? Is it approval? What are we asking you to do? Where is that in the process? Let’s spell it out. Then that clear communication of expectations, it will remove the ambiguity, which often causes the inaction, people just leave it there because they don’t really know what to do with it, and the confusion. Finally, the revision control. When you use an automated process to integrate all your teams, you know exactly where it’s at. You know exactly where each study’s at. You can track things the whole way through.

All right, moving onto the third critical competency of HSE and HAZOP management. That’s maintaining accountability. Most folks are pretty good at this anyway because HSE is so important, but when you have a system, you’re able to automate this accountability maintenance. With task based workflows, you can have due dates. Due dates are great when you have tasks because they’re not just arbitrary. You can really report on them. There’s no really skirting around responsibilities and due dates when it’s in a system like ProjecTools. You have reporting ability. You can see delayed action and prod people along. You can see the progress and make sure that you’re on schedule for completing your studies. You also can see the status. Like, where are we at? How can we speed this up? Really get into the metrics of your HSE management. Also, the system should retain all the mark ups and the conversations and the threads and the history, et cetera. For quick reference, either at the end of the project or as your HSE coordinator is coordinating the HSE study.

As I mentioned, ProjecTools does have an HSE application that integrates your suppliers, your subs, clients, partners, et cetera. It gets everybody working in the same HSE system. It enforces and automates the optimized agency workflow. It centralizes HSE data and automates all the tracking. Let’s take a look at project tools application right now. I’m just going to show you a little bit of it here. When you log into ProjecTools from the ProjecTools website, it is a cloud based system that you access through a browser. Here I am logged in, has the project manager here. I can see that in my incomplete tasks area I have an HSE action review. If you go back to that workflow with the initiation and the responsible party and the review and approval client review and closeout. Right here, the task will tell me where I’m at in the workflow, when this thing is due. It will give me all of the relevant information about the HAZOP study so I can go in and complete it without having to dig for all of the additional information. I can see that there’s a description, there’s a recommendation, there’s reference documents, reference files. Then there’s a history and a log of all the things that have happened. I can see the last thing that happened is the Quality Surveillance (QS) manager has completed their response. They attached the LS4 Valve 51. It does effect the operations manual.

Taking into account all of this nice, neat HSE study package, I can make an informed contribution to this conversation. You just add it in here. You can add supporting files and so forth. Then you make a disposition which will indicate to the workflow in the application what it should do. Does it affect the operation manual? Yes. Okay. That will keep, it’ll note it here going forward. If I accept this, it’s going to move it on through the workflow. It’s going to go to the approver. If I don’t approve this, I can send it to the approver anyway, or I can send it back to the assignee. The approver, on down the line, he would have the ability to, he or she would have the ability to either approve it or send it on to a client and have the client review it as well. There’s a lot of flexibility. The workflows should adapt to whatever the needs of the study are, which is something I didn’t really talk about before in the workflow section, but keep that in mind as you think about how to optimize your HSE and HAZOP management

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