Saving time and money
Why make things more complicated than they are? Dag Rune Gabrielsen in Swire Oilfield Services took control of the QHSE system and saved his employer both time and money.
Dealing with offshore transportation containers, chemical transportation tanks, and chemical storage and handling, quality is of highest priority for Swire Oilfield Services. Procedures and certifications have to be in order and laws and regulations have to be up to date and known to everyone in the company.
At QHSE manager Dag Rune Gabrielsen’s initiative, Synergi Life replaced the paper-based QHSE system in the Norwegian and British parts of the company in 2007. Swire Oilfield Services operates globally, and in 2008 they went live with the QHSE management system internationally.
Gabrielsen decided from the start to take personal control of the whole process. “By being part of the implementation and learning how to set up Synergi Life, I put as little strain as possible on the organization. I can consider our needs and acquire new modules for the system when required. This way of doing it also saves us the costs of having to call in DNV’s consultants for everything we need done.” Gabrielsen started out with a five-day administrator’s course at DNV in Stavanger. Before the implementation he bought 80 consulting hours to be used according to need – in addition to the initial installation carried out by DNV. That made the costs predictable. A year after going live globally, he still hadn’t used 80 hours.
For an agile start, Gabrielsen made only adjustments that were strictly necessary, and he led the internal courses for basic and extensive users himself. All users were asked to report to him whenever they noticed irregularities in the system, enabling him to straighten things out immediately. By trial and error the road was made by walking. “No matter how you do it, an HSE system cannot just be set up once and for all. It’s a system that has to be built over time,” Gabrielsen says.
Logical and easy to use
DNV regularly checks the project status in meetings with Gabrielsen, who is still learning how to get as much useful output as possible. “Although Synergi Life is a complex system, it’s logical and can be set up to be easy to use. For example, we are registering through an ‘Observation Card’ function. This is a very efficient way of registering the information, and cases may be sent directly to the one responsible without going through an executive officer,” he says.
After having taught colleagues in other countries how to use Synergi Life, he is now sharing the responsibility of development and maintainance with collegues in the US and the UK. Some merging of different cultures within the system must be taken into consideration, but together they are now paving the way for an optimal and proactive risk management strategy in every location.
There are now 100 Synergi Life users in Swire Oilfield Services. The licence was recently expanded to 299 users. In the future, there will be local administrators in every country. The main administrator of Swire Oilfields’ common HSE database in Norway is Gabrielsen. "It’s a comprehensive job, though it’s not as hard as you might think. With guidance and advice from DNV, the DIY method is really no problem to apply to Synergi Life. You just need to have a certain flair and passion for it," Gabrielsen says.
Top reasons why we chose Synergi Life software:
- Quality is of highest priority
- Synergi Life is efficient and easy to use
This is what we gained:
- Enables optimal and proactive risk management strategy
- Cost savings, time savings
SWIRE OILFIELD SERVICES IN BRIEF
Swire Oilfield Services, a part of the Swire Group, is a specialist in the hire and sales of offshore transportation containers, chemical transportation tanks, chemical storage, handling and blending facilities and helicopter fuel services to the global energy industry.
The company is based in Aberdeen in the UK and employs more than 120,000 people worldwide. They mainly operate from eight custom-built bases, four in the UK and Norway and four in Denmark and the Netherlands. They also operate from Nigeria, Angola, Russia and the USA.
