How the Agility Management System helped Petrofac to gain certification to ISO 9001, 14001 and OHSAS 18001.
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Petrofac is a leading international service provider to the energy industry, with a diverse client portfolio.
Petrofac design, build, manage and maintain infrastructure for the energy industries. Their comprehensive and tailored service offering covers each stage of the project life cycle and a variety of commercial models, giving their clients the flexibility they need.
The History
BusinessPort were awarded the contract to provide the Agility Management System to Atlantic Power & Gas in 1997 as the immediate aim of the company was to gain certification to ISO 9001, 14001 and OHSAS 18001. The company was then bought by PGS, a Norwegian survey specialist and then in 2002, Petrofac purchased the company.
Petrofac have become a leading service provider to the energy industries with 31 offices worldwide and a 40 year record of innovation and successful projects.
The Challenge
Having recognised the need to replace the old system as a whole, Petrofac had embarked on an internal project to build a new corporate tool. This enterprise had failed at considerable cost. Plans were in place to have another corporate tool built, this time by a third party. However the new venture needed to be in place within a short space of time and so the corporate solution was deemed unviable in the short term.
Petrofac then embarked on a new venture that required an effective system, both to assure safe working conditions offshore and to ensure effective working practices onshore. As a result, BusinessPort were engaged to deliver a working system within the time-frame required using the Agility System as the platform.
Agility had to allow Petrofac to maintain ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. With delivery being time critical, the system was installed within 3 months from the initial study to delivery of a viable system. Although an on-line system already existed, it had a number of fundamental weaknesses that the new system had to address, for example:
- Documentation was unstructured and difficult to find, leading to multiple versions of the same process
- There were limited controls and no standards in place to assure the quality of the content
- New documentation tended towards being text based, losing the power of the process maps that had originally been developed
- The content was not easily accessible offshore – particularly the availability of printed copies
- The software platform was old and no longer supported
- Inconsistency in usage increased the risk of Petrofac’s reputation being severely compromised
The Solution
BusinessPort undertook a ‘Discovery Exercise’ to explore the situation and to put together a suitable solution. The resulting proposal had two themes. Improve the Infrastructure by putting a server on-board the offshore platform. The onshore Agility would be replicated every hour offshore, ensuring up-to-date information was always available. Having a dedicated server would also ensure that documents, particularly printed copy, were always immediately available. In addition, System Administrators and System Users (onshore and offshore) would all receive appropriate training prior to Agility going live.
The other theme was to improve the content by reviewing process maps and written procedures from the old Agility and making sure that those selected were “fit for purpose”. BusinessPort wanted to produce new process maps to fill in any gaps, and to ensure the new BMS was restructured in a way that documentation was easy to find, and all ancillary features of the old BMS (directories, company news etc) were available on the new Agility System.
The initial scope for the project (seven weeks for development and launch) meant that only the key elements of the Agility System would be implemented by BusinessPort and that Petrofac would deliver the remaining content themselves.
Further investigation into the project showed that initial estimates of the workload had been underestimated. Petrofac had estimated there to be around 150 processes, of which 50 would need to be written from scratch. However, this concluded with over 300 processes that required reviewing and around 20 new process maps being created (with another 40 deferred as the information wasn’t available to complete them at the time).
Despite the additional weight of work, a team of three BusinessPort Business Analysts were able to deliver the Agility System on time with the following key features:
- A hierarchical structure of Process reflecting the Client Business Model was produced and populated, giving a top-down navigational structure or by which documentation could be easily (and logically) accessed
- A navigational structure (similar to Windows Explorer) was created and populated, giving quicker access to the same documentation
- All the available documentation was associated with the Agility structure, not only those documents deemed to be a priority
The Benefits
Petrofac were delighted with the results. The look and feel of the Agility, the ease by which it could be navigated and the flexibility of the tool for adding new content instantly were all felt to provide a key differentiator when it came to pitching for new business themselves.
The process overviews highlighted a business structure that hadn’t been visible before and allowed the creation of visual ‘models’ with which new staff could be introduced to key practices (Risk Management, Integrity Management, Integrity Assurance).
Models were also put in place to demonstrate compliance with the requirements of ISO 9001, ISO14001, OHSAS 18001 and ITIL (the latter two not being part of the original requirement).
Petrofac were an early adopter of the process-based approach and continue to be focused on continuous improvement while ensuring risk and compliance are managed within the Agility System.
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