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The Department of Labor states that on-the-job fatality rates are seven times higher for oil and gas extraction workers than all other industries. The only solution to this serious problem is proactive compliance with a comprehensive safety and health management program. Continual risk identification, analysis and policy enforcement are the keys to keeping workers safe and avoiding operational downtime.

Risk Assessments
Hazards in oil and gas industry are divided between safety and injury dangers and health and illness hazards. Front-line supervisors should work with safety managers to conduct risk assessments that are founded on historical experience, analytical methods and field knowledge and judgement. A risk assessment will ask three basic questions for each possible event: what can go wrong, how likely will it occur and what are the impacts. Both qualitative and quantitative answers offer unique value. Safety planning and risk assessments require that everyone involved understands the objectives, the methods, the resources required and how the results will be applied.

Standard Evaluation Methods
A risk assessment generally involves four basic steps: hazard identification, frequency projection, consequence assessment and risk evaluation. Hazard identification methods include literature research, safety audits, periodic walk-throughs and what-if brainstorming. Popular tools include FMEA, HAZOP and HAZID. Frequency assessment methods include fault tree, event tree, human reliability and common cause failure analysis tools. Consequence assessment methods include source term, aquatic transport, atmospheric dispersion and blast and thermal radiation models. Popular evaluation methods include risk profiles, indexes, matrixes and density curves.

The Hazard Identification (HAZID) Technique
HAZID is a safety tool to describe activities that identify risks and associated events. Offshore petroleum facilities often use HAZIDs to identify potential hazards to personnel, such as injuries and illness, to the environment, such as spills and pollution, and operational issues, such as delays and production losses.  Offshore petroleum leaders often use the HAZID technique to analyze operational procedures on vessels and machinery. A HAZID planning session will involve an interdisciplinary team that includes those who have experience with facility design, such as engineering, and facility operation, such as veteran employees. Together, they will use checklists to methodically brainstorm and identify potential hazards associated with each part of the system.

A what-if analysis uses subjective questioning to ponder potential performance problems and their consequences. For example, if an intake air filter is blocked, this will reduce the air flow through the compressor, which will consume more energy and lead to functional inefficiencies. The solution is through monthly inspections and scheduled filter replacements. Contact us today to learn how Accupoint can streamline your safety, compliance and risk assessments processes.

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"That'll never happen." Famous last words. Things can and will go wrong. The job of the business owner and engineers is to anticipate, evaluate, and mitigate possible risks in the operation. Especially if those risks include the potential of loss of life, facilities, and equipment. Risk management and risk assessment are tools to assist companies in understanding and mitigating potential problems. 

Anticipate the Risks:
This involves identifying the risks to the operation. The best way to start is to construct what-if scenarios. What if there was a major lightning strike on the north tower? What if a blowout preventer failed? What if our computer controllers are hacked? Identify key safety processes and discuss what would happen if each failed. Include a review of injury, maintenance, and incident reports, the near misses as well as the losses. 
The best brainstorming sessions include staff from all parts of the operation, including the front line workers. They often know the dangers better than management because they've been on the receiving end of the close calls. 

Evaluate the Risks:
Separate the risks into groups (some may fall into more than one category.) As an example, headings might include loss of life/injury, loss of the facility, loss of equipment, loss of data, loss of income, environmental damage, etc. Go through each category and rank the risks from highest damage potential to lowest. The same incident may rank differently in different categories.  
This can lead to some sobering realizations such as if there was a fire at the south entrance, everyone in the maintenance bay would be trapped. 
The next step requires expertise and analysis. Each risk needs to be considered by its probability of happening. For example, a natural disaster causing major property and environmental damage is going to have a higher probability in areas prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Conversely, equipment that is new, well-maintained, and has little or no record of operating problems is going to have a lower probability of failure.
The goal is to create a risk matrix. At a glance, a company can sort out high damage, but low probability occurrences from the more immediate risks faced by the company. In short, the risk matrix identifies the likelihood of a failure and the damages if it happens. 
This can be a difficult procedure. Software experts have gathered data about everything from weather or injury reports and the programs can assist you in assigning probabilities of different types of failures. Creation of a risk matrix may start out as yellow pads and whiteboards, but in modern business, it will end up as a computerized summary identifying the company's key vulnerabilities.  

Mitigate the Risks:
This isn't just good business, its good stewardship. Once the risk matrix identifies areas of improvement, the company can target resources to lessening or eliminating the problems. Rather than trying to hurricane-proof the entire facility, it could be as simple as clearing out trees and bushes around key valves and equipment. If there is a history of injuries, a job process can be reworked or additional safety equipment installed. Computers can be upgraded and expanded to include easily accessible cloud storage. Comprehensive risk management reviews can also weed out inefficient tottering equipment that is costing the company more in dollars and danger than it is worth. 

Performing a risk evaluation is a major project. Depending on the size and complexity of the operation, it is a significant commitment of manpower and resources. But the payoff is increased efficiency, lower accident rates, and real savings by avoiding unnecessary downtime and repairs. Bonuses include a better relationship with safety and environmental regulatory agencies and potentially lower insurance rates. Contact us to discuss solutions to help streamline and improve your risk management system.

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Keeping your employees safe in the work place should be a top priority. This is especially true in the oil and gas industry.  To that end, today’s post will discuss why HSE management is important and some techniques you can apply to your business plan.
 
Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) involves creating processes for identifying workplace hazards, reducing accidents and minimizing exposure to harmful situations and substances.  This is accomplished by developing detailed operating procedures and then effectively communicating the information to your team. It is important to ensure that the information has been internalized and must be monitored to verify that it is followed.  The main goal is to maintain a safe and productive work environment. 

Why HSE Management is Important

  • It prevents your business from being fined for unsafe environments.
  • It will help you keep production levels up.
  • It protects your company from liability and a bad reputation.

How to Get Employees to Comply

Employees must complete hours of training that many people find boring and useless. To keep them interested, you should develop a safety compliance plan that is interactive, interesting, and to-the-point.

  • Design the training to help your employees, keeping in mind their backgrounds and what they already know.
  • Keep the training session short. Break up the information into several sessions if necessary.
  • Use bullet points for large amounts of information.
  • Choose carefully which topics you want to cover, to avoid information overload.
  • If possible, add humor to your lessons. This will help employees connect on a different level and make the training more enjoyable for everyone.
  • Make the trainings available online. This will allow employees to work on it from virtually any location, encouraging faster completion.

Accupoint Software provides a variety of HSE management solutions that improve operations and help businesses sort through complicated and ever-changing safety regulations. To learn more about how can help, contact us.
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Per the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), every business must keep records and safety information about the chemicals they use. These records, called Material Safety Data sheets (MSDS) or Safety Data Sheets (SDS) list many types of information about the chemicals, including toxicology, ecological information, and fire-fighting measures. As part of the petroleum industry, properly organizing and managing your MSDS is important for many reasons.
 
To Comply with OSHA

OSHA requires efficient management and organization of MSDS. If OSHA decides to perform an audit, they will check to see if you have MSDS readily available, along with other important safety documentation.  Each chemical used in your facility must have an MSDS and a corresponding label on the chemical container to comply.
 
Many Types of Chemicals

The petroleum industry uses many types of chemicals in oil refineries, especially gasoline, kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas, and other types of fuels. These chemicals can be dangerous if proper safety procedures are not known. The MSDS for each chemical will list this information so it is readily available to all employees. Efficient management of MSDS is crucial because there are so many types of chemicals used in the petroleum industry.
 
For the Safety of Your Employees

One of the main reasons OSHA requires MSDS is in case of emergency. If there is an accident and a chemical gets into an employee's eye, another employee can look up the MSDS and find out how to treat the affected employee. Another example of an emergency situation is a fire. If a chemical fire breaks out, it is important for employees to know how to fight the fire or alert firefighters about the chemical. Having readily available and organized MSDS is imperative in these situations.
 
Contact us today to find out how Accupoint Software can help you organize the management of your MSDS program.
 
Happy New Year.
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Visitors to public buildings pose a substantial security risk. This affects the oil & gas industry as much as any federal facility. A smart company can reduce that risk, however, by managing its visitors.

Some visitor management systems are "low-tech"; that is, the person signs her name, the time she enters the building, what office/employee she will visit, and signs out when leaving the building - all done using pen and paper.

The most successful visitor management relies on computerized systems to confirm visitor identity, conduct background checks, confirm security clearances and otherwise obtain information with regard to the person that may affect his or her ability to visit or that impacts the company.

To be successful, a visitor management system should combine security checks with access control. The low-tech method used keys, key cards, and badges to limit access to sensitive areas. Comprehensive visitor management systems now use smart software technology and web-based programs able to document a visitor's whereabouts in the building and track building usage by specific visitors. Some include registration through a portal before the visit. This technique helps the business check the identity and security clearance to fast-track the visitor when he arrives. The visitor management process begins several days before the actual visit and isn't completed until after the visit is over and all information analyzed.

For more information on how Accupoint’s solutions can help you manage your visitor management process, visit www.accupointsoftware.com or call us at (800) 563-6250. We always appreciate the opportunity to share information on systems that can help your business become more efficient and positioned to meet global business standards.

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03/02/2006, 07/26/2010, and 05/19/2015. To the average person, these dates mean birthdays, anniversaries, birth and deaths. But to the petroleum industry, these are considered some of the costliest failures of quality management in recent petroleum history.

Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (March 2, 2006): Because of lack of maintenance, cracks in a pipeline spilled 843,000 gallons of petroleum, devastated pristine landscapes, killed wildlife and made people sick.

        Final cost: $500 million.

Kalamazoo River, Michigan (July 26, 2010): Lack of maintenance caused a pipeline rupture that spilled 267,000 gallons of petroleum spilled into the Kalamazoo River.

        Final cost: $800 million

Refugio, California (May 19, 2015): The decision not to install a simple shutoff valve caused the decimation of local wildlife, contaminated beaches and will continue to affect ocean life for many years to come.

        Final cost: Yet to be determined

As you know, there are many other incidents within the industry where the question of adequate detection and mitigation could have reduced the impact of the incident. In fact, at a very basic level and according to the API Spec Q2 standard, your risk assessment and management should “control risk throughout the execution of a service.” In order to maintain compliance, your procedure should:

  1. Identify risks (potential or real) associated with services and service-related products;
  2. Identify and use risk management tools and techniques;
  3. Select, communicate and implement the mitigation or preventive control measures to reduce or avoid exposure to loss; and
  4. Notify the customer of remaining risks that may impact the service.
 
In short, managing risk requires proactive and preventive measures to protect your organization’s and customer’s interests. Detection and mitigation of risk potential should be at the core of your total risk assessment strategy.

For more information on how Accupoint’s solutions can help you manage your risk assessment process, visit www.accupointsoftware.com or call us at 800.563.6250.

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As a professional within the oil and gas industries, your ultimate goal is to provide safe, reliable, and high-quality products and services to your customers. As you strive to consistently achieve this goal, you already know you need to control risk throughout your processes. You are a competitive leader within your industry, so you also know the value of quality standards and compliance. So what procedure does the API Spec Q2 standard mandate in order to achieve compliance?  

According to the standard, “the organization shall maintain a documented procedure to control risk throughout the execution of service.” There’s four main components that your procedure should include, so as you develop your procedure, you’ll want to:

1.     Identify potential or real risks associated with your company’s services

2.     Recognize and use risk management tools and techniques

3.     Choose, communicate, and implement preventive control measures to reduce and/or avoid risk exposure

4.     Have a plan to alert your customer of any remaining risk (potential or real) that could impact your service to them

Lastly, you’ll want to ensure you keep records of your assessment and any associated actions taken as a result of your process. Risk assessment is an active means of facing and dealing with quality-related challenges and doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s been said that great success requires great risks, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing safety, quality or service. For more information on how Accupoint’s solutions can help you develop your risk assessment and management procedures, visit www.accupointsoftware.com or call us at (800) 563-6250.

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Contingency planning is simply an outline of procedures to follow in case some major event impacts your operations.  Technically, the contingency plan is a document that identifies the actions the organizations will take when a specified incident happens.  The plan demonstrates that the organization has thought of ways to minimize the impact to its operations and by default the customer’s.  

Below are 8 steps for effective contingency planning:

  1. Start by setting up a committee and chose a lead.  The leader will provide the skills, tools and direction so that each department can develop its own plans.  Contingency planning is a big task, so involve the appropriate number of people to maximize input.
  2. Record the business processes for each department.
  3. Identify issues (real and potential) that can negatively impact business operations.
  4. Review the issues with department managers and rank contingency priority to help focus plan development.
  5. Create plans to address each prioritized issue.  Try to minimize the number of steps required to resume operations.
  6. Test your contingency plans. If a portion of the plan is flawed or conflicts with other contingency plans, modify and then reassess the plan.
  7. Formalize and communicate the plan with applicable personnel within the organization.
  8. Finally, make sure to review the plan at predetermined intervals to insure continued relevance.   The review helps identify areas for improvement or modification.

By following the steps outlined above, you will be able to create effective contingencies to address your business functions.  Remember, contingency plans should be developed for critical processes, tasks and/or systems.

To learn how Accupoint can help you streamline contingency planning, call us toll-free at 800.563.6250 or visit us on the web at accupointsoftware.com.

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There are some people in the oil and gas community that believe poor processes, not personnel, were the cause of the Macondo incident. Don’t count Kevin Lacy, former BP vice president for drilling and completions, as one of those people. In the past, Lacy has raised concerns about the way the oil and gas industry looks at people and processes. Lacy spoke at DecomWorld’s 3rd Annual Offshore Safety Conference and his speech can be read here.

A natural response to catastrophic incidents is to blame inadequate processes. However, as it turns out, most processes for offshore sites are adequate. The training of people is the true catalyst for controlling risk. If employees were trained to gain proficiency as opposed to passing a test, there would likely be fewer incidents.

Currently, there is a culture of “This won’t happen” among well site employees. This mentality is dangerous because frontline employees need to be prepared in order to mitigate risk. Industry leaders are fighting to change this mentality to “This will happen, but how do I make sure it won’t happen to us?” This change in philosophy acknowledges risk and establishes the conduct necessary to mitigate it.

Employees are more likely to heed safety requirements if they feel that management is sincere in their pursuit of risk management. Often times, safety initiatives are pushed down from the top, but with little conviction from management. If managers are present at well sites, a sense of credibility is projected to the frontline workers. This has proven to be an effective way to make sure the pursuit of higher production and cost reductions do not compromise safety.

Changing the cultural elements of these well sites can be a complicated task. It is necessary to have a system in place that helps manage safety and training. Accupoint’s cloud-based SAM solution allows you to manage employees from anywhere at anytime. SAM ensures that all of your training and competency management documents are stored in one secure location.

To learn more about Accupoint’s SAM solution visit accupointsoftware.com or call (800)563-6250.

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 In today’s post, we would like to discuss one of the essential additions to Spec Q1-9th edition: Risk Assessment and Management.

With the Deepwater Horizon incident of 2010 still fresh in our minds, we are all aware of the consequences of failing to acknowledge and address risks. However, it’s also important to realize that catastrophic incidents are neither inevitable, nor something we should have to accept as we pursue operations. Correctly managing our technology and processes can allow us to mitigate risk without impacting productivity.

To begin, let’s take a look at the requirements of Spec Q1-9th edition standard:

The organization shall maintain a documented procedure to identify and control risk associated with impact on delivery and quality of product. The procedure shall identify the techniques, tools, and their application for risk identification, assessment, and mitigation.

        Risk assessment associated with product delivery shall include:
                a) facility/equipment availability and maintenance; and
                b) supplier performance and material availability/supply

        Risk assessment associated with product quality shall include
                c) delivery of non-conforming product
                d) availability of competent personnel

Records of risk assessment and management including actions taken shall be maintained.

Spec Q1 emphasizes the importance of managing the risks related to facilities, equipment, materials, non-conformities, and personnel. So let’s explore the concept of risk management more fully, and review some composite factors that have been identified in past incidents:  

        1.    Lack of Commitment-. Management sets the tone and culture of an organization, and there is a strong correlation between the level of managerial commitment and corresponding incident rates.

        2.    Flawed Management of Change- A large percentage of incidents take place after changes to a process or procedure.  Implementing an effective management of change procedure and, more importantly, evaluating                  those efforts can dramatically reduce incident rates.

        3.    Inadequate Focus- In the race for productive operations, organizations tend to place an emphasis on response, rather than prevention. Building risk management into your processes from the beginning can help reverse that             trend and lead to positive impacts to the corporate culture.

        4.    Ineffective Communications- In many cases, information is spread throughout the organization, with different departments having a piece of the puzzle.  As an organization grows, this problem becomes worse. An effective         risk assessment/management system reduces barriers to communication and improves communication systems.

In our next post, we’ll look at ways in which technology can be used to mitigate the items identified above and help your organization develop a world class compliance management system.

For more information on how Accupoint ‘s solutions can help your organization manage risk, contact us at 800.563.6250 or visit our website to arrange a demonstration of our flexible, cloud based API Spec Q1 management solution.

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