Case Study

Woodside iSSoW project delivers results

 

Our Client

Woodside is Australia's largest publicly traded oil and gas exploration and production company and one of the world's leading producers of liquefied natural gas. With its headquaerters in Perth, Western Australia, Woodside operates offshore and onshore production facilities and employs several thousand people.

The Challenge

Prior to 2008, Woodside used a number of paper-based permit to work systems for controlling potentailly hazardous works on its facilties. Without centralised governance, each facility had tailored the core system to suit its own needs. There was no single Woodside way of doing things.

Woodside undertook a major project to develop an Integrated Safe System of Work (iSSoW) to standardise the inter-related processes of permit to work, risk assessment and isolation management as part of its ongoing program to improve the safety of its workers.

Prior to implementing the iSSoW across all of its onshore and offshore facilities, Woodside faced a number of issues:

• More than 60% of incidents had permit-related causal factors
• Heavy reliance on written permit procedures - approximately 5,000 pages
• Inconsistent interpretation and application of procedures
• Personnel moving between company sites had to learn and apply site-specific interpretations of procedures
• Over-use of permits resulting in excessive administration to the detriment of work control
• Ineffective learning of lessons across the organisation

Woodside recognised that an electronic iSSoW could harness the power of modern computer technology to ensure that busienss rules around permit to work, certificates, hazard identification and risk assessment, and isolation management were applied in a robus, consisten and simple manner.

However, a global search and evaluation by Woodside identified that no existing iSSoW system could provide all of the functionality required. Woodside decided that it could develop a purpose-built system that was flexible enough to meet their stringent requirements and meet regulatory requirements into the future.

The Solution

Woodside selected Sage Technology to develop its iSSoW software solution due to their:

• Demonstrated competence and track record in the develoment, implementation and support of electronic permit to work systems
• Proven ability to respond to client requirements
• Proven ability to contribute to innovation
• Proven and future ability to service an increased client base
• Shared vision for the resulting product
• Location
• Business liquidity
• References from existing permit to work software clients

Sage Technology worked closely with Woodside to document the requirements of how the iSSoW software needed to perform to apply Woodside's business rules. The resultant software solution, SageSURPASS, is an integral component of Woodside's iSSoW which:

• Integrates risk assessment, isolation management and permitry
• Applies and eforces iSSoW business rules
• Links Work Categories to Hazards and Controls in the HIRA (Hazard Identification Risk Assessment) database
• Is highly configurable to allow rapid ongoing optimisation

The Result

Woodside has rolled out its iSSoW program and SageSURPASS to more than 4,000 users across its onshore and offshore oil and gas production facilities.

As a result, Woodside has achieved significant improvemetns in permit-related safety performance across the company. Other outcomes of this major project include:

• The application of standard working practices across the company
• System documentation reduced by 98% (from 5,000 pages to 100 pages)
• An ability to share lessons learned rapidly between facilities
• Increased security of isolation schemes, permit hierarchy and work control
• Greater hazard awareness among the workforce
• Significant efficiency gains (isolation scheme preparation time reduced from six hours to 15 minutes through reuse of templates)
• Permit-related incidents have fallen from more than 60% of total incidents to fewer than 20%

Overall, the same volume of work is being performed at Woodside but more safely and with fewer permits and fewer permit breaches. Woodside now has a program of implementing SageSURPASS in the commissioning phase of new facilities to embed the iSSoW standards and practices from day one.