The Oil & Gas industry is governed by an intricate and complex system of regulations, laws, and standards. Over the years, EPC companies in this sector have learned to navigate a plethora of protocols and procedures, including various permits and licenses and approvals, but it’s no easy task in a world where the rules and requirements are constantly evolving. Thus, achieving compliance and assuring quality continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of project management in the sector even today.
Why Compliance Is Still a Challenge Despite Strong Industry Regulations
But what makes compliance such a challenge? Surely an industry as tightly regulated and driven by processes as Oil & Gas has by now managed to crack the problem?
Actually, no. The industry still relies heavily on human effort and human managers – ie the skill and abilities and experience of the individuals involved – to enforce procedures, and that makes compliance a process that is inefficient, costly, unpredictable, and difficult to control.
What’s the solution?
It’s not more or better manpower or more and better controls, it’s stopping the reliance on human effort and turning instead to an incorruptible and foolproof digital system.
Specificially, an engineering deliverable management system or EDMS.
To understand why EDMS is necessary for 100% compliance, we must understand what compliance actually means in the context of Oil & Gas project management.
There’s three parts to it. First, understanding the processes and steps to be followed, from initiation to handoff, across engineering, procurement, and construction. In other words you have to know exactly what steps you are supposed to take in that specific region at that specific time, based on which you make a Project Quality Plan. The project quality plan lays out exactly how the project will meet the agreed-upon standards (metrics, responsibilities, objectives, procedures, roles), as well as the quality control process ie the checks and balances.
Second, you must enforce the Quality Plan. This is the tricky bit; a quality plan on paper is vastly different from a quality plan in real life. Many EPC organisations do have good Quality Plans on paper, but cannot enforce them without managers to chase down and follow up and fire fight and track and double-check and verify, and also to keep tabs on each other because human error does creep in and a small error, unchecked, can snowball into a disastrous delay. Sadly, quality control without an EDMS is a post-mortem undertaking where you have to wait for errors to happen before you can act; there’s no way to prevent errors happening in the first place.
Finally, you must be prepared to prove compliance. What usually happens is that organisations have to undergo an ‘auditing’ process, conducted by a third party, and as with any other audit, it is stressful, tedious, and time-consuming, and can often result in delayed payments and/or rework.
So the real problem is that quality control without an EDMS is all about cure, not prevention.
Why EDMS Is the Only Reliable Path to 100% Project Compliance
Now that we understand the problem, let’s understand why EDMS is the only solution.
An EDMS contains workflows that manage work without the need for human intervention. The workflows are programmed according to the quality plan and the workflows drive the work. Thus, all the required laws and standards and regulations are achieved ‘automatically’ or as a matter of course. You cannot skip or forget a step; every action is carried out exactly as prescribed in the Quality Plan because the EDMS is driving each action.
Take an IDC or Inter-Discipline Check in an organisation which uses an EDMS. During the EDMS implementation, the pre-defined ISO process detailing out the steps in the IDC process – like who has to review it first, who else has to approve it, how approval must be documented, how a change must be effected, how it must be documented and approved, etc. – would have been programmed and saved in the EDMS as ‘IDC workflow’. When that workflow is initiated, everybody has to follow each step and only when one step is completed correctly will you be allowed to proceed to the next step. There’s really no other way to carry out an IDC within the EDMS except by meticulously following the prescribed steps.
And so audits from even the most stringent Auditing Body become a no-brainer, not to mention a no-stressor, because every step was already automatically documented ie recorded by the system in real time. That means no nasty surprises, no problematic oversights waiting to trip you up, no buck-passing and finger-pointing and back-and-forth. All that becomes a thing of the past. An EDMS means that you can prove without effort (ie a few clicks) that every step in every process was carried out exactly as prescribed.
In conclusion, if you have an EDMS, you no longer have to bother with Quality Control because you can guarantee Quality Assurance.
