Health, safety and environment (HSE) is a huge concern in the oil and gas industry. Safety fails in the industry might have fatal consequences, and during the last couple of years, there have been some devastating accidents in the oil and gas industry. These accidents have devastating outcomes both for the environment, the economy and on the lives of the people involved. In worst-case scenarios, accidents in the oil and gas industry take lives.
Generally, the daily safety routines are not hard to follow, like filling out a Job safety analysis form, report a hazard, make sure that maintenance is done or simply remembering to put on safety gear. Still, many of the recent accidents the human factors have been a huge factor in the course of the accident. With new technology, oil and gas companies can enhance their safety by eliminating the human factors and helping the employees of oil and gas companies with their HSE-routines. Here are some of the factors that will improve your safety in the oil and gas industry:
1. Reports are easier to deliver
To make sure that everyone contributes to make the work site safer and thus build a safety culture it has to be easy to deliver reports and notify management about hazards and dangers. Conventional reporting by the use of pen and paper is time consuming and stressful. This might cause your employees to become sloppy about the reporting and notification. In order to achieve a safe work environment managers are dependent of getting reports of what is going on in the field. With mobile applications, reports can be filed directly on the mobile phone or tablet, making reporting easier will make more employees contribute to the company’s safety culture.
2. Hazards are updated real-time.
Another problem with the conventional reporting system is that there often is a delay from the report is filed to the management receives the report and mitigate potential hazards. In really big oil and gas companies the delay can be several days, even weeks before the right person receives the information. Then it might be too late and the catastrophe might already be a fact. With the use of a mobile application, everything that is reported is updated to everyone with access to it real-time. This mean that the hazard can be mitigated or removed in a matter of hours instead of days.
3. Less distance between field workers and company management
In big organizations, the distance between field workers and company management can be huge. This is specially an issue when working with safety in the oil and gas industry. When this distance is large, it becomes hard for the management to understand what is going on at the ground level. The distance become even bigger when data is reentered several times, as data might get lost when the data is reentered, it becomes even harder for the managers to understand what is going on at the field. When data is entered through mobile applications however, the data is fresh from the people who entered it. Manager can choose to see the statistics in the command center or simply go in to each and every report to get a more detailed overview. Mobile applications will therefore make it easier for managers to make good decisions, based on what is going on out on the fields.
4. Visualization
To truly grasp what is going on when reports are delivered it is important to get an image of what is going on. Mobile applications allow you to take photos and attach them to your reports. In addition to this the reports that are delivered can be visualized through a map interface and statistics, making it easy to know where the action is happening.
Safety in the oil and gas industry – a constant goal
No matter how good solutions we use and how serious employees take safety in the oil and gas industry, the industry must continue its strive to become safer. Mobile technology is no guarantee that accidents wont happen, but it is a huge leap forward towards a safer oil and gas industry and will help companies to secure the environment, their investments and the health and lives of their employees.