Some the most thought-provoking instances of incidents and environmental damage in the recent history have been often associated with the oil and gas as well as petrochemical industries.

While this may have created a negative impact on the overall environmental health – it has also provided us with a learning opportunity – setbacks such as these, have allowed adoption of better EHS and OHS standards, globally.

Permit to Work in Oil and gas

The simplest and most direct being the compliance requirement of Permit to Work (PTW) in all streams of maintenance and operational processes. This mandate worldwide has allowed the dynamic oil & gas and petrochemical industries is to streamline, define and manage their ‘risks’.

Process safety, safety barrier management, HAZOP and HAZID studies form the basis of petrochemical and oil & gas EHS ecosystem.

An automated PTW system takes these very traits at least a few paces ahead of the proactive risk management. Whether onshore or on offshore platform, automated PTW software allows transparent and safe operations. The task checklists, their risk assessment workflows and finally the permit authorities are all encompassed in a singular online view.

Digital PTW establishes a reliable digital workflow which is always accessible – available even when the mobile network isn’t available.

Digital PTW systems have another crucial insight to offer as their use increases – reliable data. As permits are filed, permitted and executed – a significant amount of information exchanges occurs – these are critical, and need to be measured for the purposes of making safety, proactive.

Such data insight management is only possible when a robust digital platform displays multiple capabilities ranging from data capture, storage, analytics and measurements against known KPIs.

EHS software for Oil and gas

While the management of risk through safety barrier management and assessments is critical – the occupational health and safety is also a constant stream of activities which must function precisely.

EHS software provides the ability for EHS personnel in oil and gas industry to set compliance standards and measure the organizational performance against the set methods. Not only do EHS software offer the ability to inspect, observe and conduct audits – they can define corrective and preventive actions against non-compliances and keep on tracking them, till their closure.

Digital EHS software also seamlessly combines many streams of EHS data – like incident management and behaviour based safety data to allow decisionmakers base their decisions upon measurable and recent data. What this means is that several streams of EHS information – incident, near-miss, safety inspection, observation and corrective preventive action etc. – when seen holistically; offer superior EHS and OHS value deliverables than when analyzed singularly.

The ability to respond swiftly and comprehensively in face of emergencies can also be managed within the EHS software. Thus, providing a multipronged approach to tackle the EHS and OHS liabilities.

Select a flexible system

While off-the-shelf solutions are readily available – a configurable or in some cases, customized digital platform delivers the longevity industries crave.

This is mainly down to 3 key reasons:

• Near-exact to exact replication of ‘actual’ operational activities into digital ‘twin’.
• User acceptability which is at the heart of any EHS system increases significantly.
• Reporting and analytics dashboards can be tweaked as per your process.

Although these points may seem as less important, when an oil and gas company embarks on the requisition process of an automated platform – they start becoming clearer when they start paying attention to vendor requirements.

Data governance and ‘knowing thyself’ in terms of operational excellence stands to trump even the best consultants – therefore, before planning to automate safety systems at your organization based in the oil and gas domain – start small and allow the momentum to gather right from the lower tiers of operations.