Transforming Reactive into Proactive Monitoring Through Effective Lessons Learned and Enhanced Safety Culture to Prevent Incidents
Authors: Kumar P. , Veluri A. , Palagummi S. V. , Al Dhaheri S. M. , Bazuhair A. , Surendran S. 
Published: September 2024

HSE is always the highest priority at all levels of business in the Oil & Gas industry aimed at ensuring personal safety, process safety, driving safety, protecting environment and company reputation. The objective of this paper is to present the importance of going beyond minimum investigation with enhanced accuracy of root cause analysis and suggest effective recommendations to prevent reoccurrences.

Aimed at ensuring 100% safe work environment by preventing the incidents and maintaining the reducing trends, enhancing the success & effectiveness of corrective actions has been part of key focus areas through excellence in investigation process. Successful and effective implementation of learnings is one of the biggest challenges towards the journey of prevention of incidents. Considering the actions to prevent re-occurrences as proactive tool, sustained efforts have been taken to improve the quality of investigation by engaging competent investigators, effective RCA by using the techniques appropriately, using hierarchy of controls to suggest the most effective recommended actions aligned with the root cause and implement the applicable learnings from the internal and external incidents across all the sites within the agreed timeframe.

Enhancement in the learning from incident process resulted in remarkable improvement in terms of reducing trends of injuries with lowest number of total recordable injuries compared to last five years, significant reduction in process safety events and the motor vehicle crashes.

Incidents statistics show an average of 500 incidents have been investigated per year including about 10% of high severity events. Recent analysis shows about 42% of learnings from incidents were related to procedural compliance, followed by 19% related to Training & Awareness, 12% related to appropriate Tools & equipment, 7% related to design issue, and remaining 20% were related to manning, supervision & monitoring requirements. Analysis of past five years incidents analysis shows about 80% of recommendations related only to strengthening the administrative controls. With firm belief, efforts were focused on addressing the following chronic concerns: Concluding corrective actions without appropriate root cause analysis.Considering violations of individual as key causes rather than deep diving into the system issue related to personal and/or job factors.Lack of commitment to take corrective actions beyond administrative controls.

Reoccurrences of incidents with repetitive root causes indicates need to focus on robust and sustainable efforts to meet & exceed the expectations of HSE Management system. This has been made possible by ensuring that corrective actions must be successful in integrating the missing best practices into the work culture resulting in effective controls of personal & process safety hazards across the various business segments (i.e., Drilling, Operations, Projects and Support services) of the company.