A NEED to better track the outcomes of safety and risk studies on oil and gas platforms operating off the North West Shelf led to a place as a finalist in this year’s Engineering Awards.
The Transfield Worley-Woodside Alliance found it needed a database that could manage the quantity of information and track action orders made as a result of those studies.
The alliance conducts dozens of risk and safety management surveys each year on the three platforms it has responsibility for.
Transfield Worley risk engineer Damian Phillis said the database had halved the number of people needed to manage action orders from the risk management surveys.
“It also allows management to monitor the performance of the project teams in closing out actions. We can now track our close-out performance using a key performance indicator,” he said.
Mr Phillis said the old system required the risk management team to enter minutes from studies into an Excel spreadsheet. The data from that spreadsheet was then manually transferred to another Excel database to track the outcome of those minutes.
“But we couldn’t really track it because the project teams didn’t have access to that database,” he said.
“We couldn’t really give them access to it without losing control.”
The system was designed and built completely in-house.
“Our risk engineering group, with some help from our graduate process engineering resources, designed what we needed from the database. We then took that to our IT department and they developed the system,” Mr Phillis said.
“One of the benefits of doing the system in-house is that we can modify it easily.”
The system now offers much greater transparency. It is also set up to send out reminder emails on safety and risk management actions and will even send out an email when the due date for those action orders passes.
“Just that function in itself is a huge resource saving,” Mr Phillis said.
“Having all of the information in the one database also makes it easier to search.”
