Reducing risks and costs with world class QHSE risk management system

Satisfied customers provide the best advertisement for any product, and the Synergi® risk management system has plenty of them. Flexibility, configurability and user-friendliness are among the qualities they highlight.

“Synergi serves as a consistent action tracking and reporting tool which supports continuous improvement. These factors are important aspects of a growing business.”
-Former HSE vice president Kurt Kriter, Hess Corporation

These features are acclaimed not least by oil and offshore service companies, whose global reach means that they need a solution which can be adapted to many different operating conditions. Synergi was the first incident management system for health, safety and the environment (HSE) to be implemented worldwide by US-based Hess Corporation, for instance.

"It provides us with real-time reporting of HSE issues and the opportunity to learn from each other," observes former HSE vice president Kurt Kriter. "Additionally, Synergi serves as a consistent action tracking and reporting tool which supports continuous improvement. These factors are important aspects of a growing business."

Expanding

Other users who make the same point include Statoil, the Norwegian oil company which has been expanding fast into exploration and production operations beyond its home waters. It has acquired operatorships in various countries in recent years, making overall HSE strategy its responsibility and allowing it to explore some new challenges with the aid of Synergi.

"Continuous improvement of this user-friendly tool is vital for a successful roll-out into new areas," notes Arne M Martinsen, who heads the analysis, monitoring and support department in the group's Development and Production International business area. "We have no exceptions in Statoil: everyone uses Synergi® in every country," he explains. "If they don't have PCs, we must accept that they need to use paper forms. And if they can't read and write, we'll have to solve that as well."

Such comments reflect the need companies now have to address risk quickly and to demonstrate risk performance, thanks to globalisation and stakeholder demands for corporate accountability and transparency. Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) requirements are therefore increasingly important for companies looking to succeed in a globalised world.

Advances

Drilling rig operator Seadrill is another company which has benefited from ongoing advances with Synergi designed to meet these demands. The Stavanger-based company has adjusted the system's recently developed eForm interface to meet its own preferences, while successfully implementing this offline version. That ensure more employees can use Synergi while also allowing it to be used for reporting from remote locations which lack the data links required to support direct online input.

"Although eForm is offline, it doesn't seem like that to the user," explains information system manager Steffen Myklebust. He thereby puts a finger on a key aspect of Synergi. Personnel using the eForm option, for instance, report from rigs and ships into the central system as if they were working in normal online mode. When they click "submit", a file is generated and automatically e-mailed to the central database - where it gets imported in the same automated manner.

Such user-friendliness has also been identified by Hess as a key benefit of Synergi, along with the ability to provide HSE data in a much more timely and efficient manner. Other advantages for the US operator include the opportunity to measure risk factors - thereby laying the basis for improving these - and ease of customisation.

Preference

Synergi comes with a wide range of standard modules, interface products, reports and plug-ins to cover most client needs, but caters for specific company preferences as well. These cover such areas as data capture, processing or communication where the standard set up cannot accommodate user requirements.

The value of such configurability in securing acceptance of the system at all levels in a company is also stressed by Elaine Rust, global HSE and quality manager at Subsea 7. On joining this leading subsea engineering and construction enterprise in 2007, she saw the need to identify internal stakeholders and ensure they developed ownership of the system.

Subsea 7 had already been using Synergi for four years at that time, but the challenge Rust faced was to see that the system was fully embraced by management. Her solution was to deliver a series of dashboards which would enable users to view data relevant to them as well as information across the company.

 "One dashboard doesn't fit all," she notes. "[We developed them] for corporate, regional, site, project and vessel data, and each user could see the details they needed to carry out their role and monitor performance." This work has delivered a number of substantial benefits to Subsea 7, including transparency from vice president level right down to the worksite - and vice versa. Another major advantage highlighted during the dashboard-creation process was the extensive reduction in administrative time.

Stability

Seadrill also reports gains from its eForm development in the shape of greater administrative ease and enhanced stability as well as in usability - the most important issue.

Myklebust explains that, because it has many low-end users with minimal Synergy training, the group decided to simplify the registration process in the eForm version. All fields not in use were removed, and the user sees only those relevant to the case type. Information was grouped in logical sections, with scrolling instead of tabs.

Input validation ensures that no important fields are skipped, and the whole registration job is conducted on a single page. "We now have many new users in the company who weren't able to register cases before," Myklebust reports. About 3 000 of the company's roughly 7 000 employees can now report in Synergi.

To manage risk is to understand risk. That is what Synergi helps Seadrill do. Working in so many different cultures makes it essential to comprehend the different contexts which may be involved in a single drilling operation. Since Seadrill has used Synergi for such a long time, it works hard on the quality of the data being entered because of its crucial significance for further analysis. This system has been and will remain a useful tool in the group for managing risk. But different cultures, practices and environments constantly present new challenges, which call for constant evolution and improvement in a tool originally designed for use offshore in Norway.