Managing risk:  monitoring HSE and performance indicators to enhance operational safety

E&P innovation is largely focused on the technical challenges of recovering more oil and gas, such as enhancing subsurface imaging to improve exploration success and increasing recovery using smarter operating/production systems.  However this alone won’t help companies stay successful.

Risk management has become fundamental to the systematic mitigation of issues brought about by increasing operational and managerial liabilities. In general, risk management plans are integrated with overall E&P management systems and processes.  The nature of the business is such that day-to-day management issues add to a complex environment which makes it difficult to determine what needs attention most urgently. Further, the geographic dispersion of key personnel, site personnel rotation and less-than-desirable information management and collaboration can reduce risk management ‘visibility”.

Performance indicators are widely acknowledged as a useful tool for the monitoring of what is happening in a particular monitored process or activity. Performance indicators come in many forms, but at their heart, they are a representation of the state of a particular process of activity. A visual tool such as a ‘dashboard’ – a visual representation of state – is one of the more frequent visual forms used to monitor performance indicators.

Performance indicators are only as good as their underlying data sources and only really useful when they are monitored regularly. It’s important to select the right ones to monitor, which is not always obvious and requires a deep understanding of the underlying activity and processes. And performance indicators are most useful when they are used in a predictive manner – to provide notification before an event rather than sounding an alarm after one occurs.

Complex problems require innovative solutions. Some of the more innovative are the result of integration of multiple applications which function independently, but when coupled together provide deeper and more useful information.