RUC - Unified Contractor Register for the Oil and Gas Companies Operating in Colombia
Authors: Correa F. , Rojas R.A. 
Published: December 2007

Since 1994, the HSE Committee of the Hydrocarbon Sector in Colombia, comprised of operating companies of the sector affiliated to the Colombian Safety Council, has been carrying out a supportive process to involve all contractors of the sector in HSE programs effectively. A set of standard requirements was established to be promoted and required by the sector, based on what the companies had on their HSE systems and Colombian legal requirements. Such requirements were structured by following the ongoing improvement and management schemes of ISO9000 standards.

Oil companies, through these guidelines, aim at jointly achieving high HSE standard performance with their contractors as a synonym of quality and effectiveness in the operation.

In order to verify its implementation, the Colombian Safety Council, upon request by companies, designed and put into effect (1998) a contractor performance evaluation system, the RUC, in compliance with such minimum requirements. It was intended to obtain a harmonious development of the sector's HSE programs through a performance evaluation process for an ongoing improvement in contractor management, thus ensuring compliance with legal requirements and fulfilling the expectations of efficiency in the operation. It monitors contractors and identifies improvement opportunities that will be developed on a coordinated and supportive basis among companies and contractors with the Colombian Safety Council.

By September 1999, the RUC already has 500 contractors registered and 270 assessed. There is a reliable database with strengths and improvement opportunities per economic activity and size of companies, and it is an important source of information for HSE Benchmarking of the sector.

RUC development and structure and a summary of the database that serves as a basis to provide an ongoing improvement, benchmarking and the promotion of the best practices will be presented in the work proposed.

Background

In Colombia, the oil industry has played a leading role in pursuing the development of preventive systems and programs pertaining to work-related risks. Due to the fact that it already has high internal safety standards, one of its main concerns was to raise contractor industry standards. To that effect and aiming at ensuring that those standards would be met, each company, on an independent basis and as per its own policies, had a set of minimum HSE requirements that contractors had to meet in order to be eligible to provide their services.

Since 1994, the National HSE Committee for the oil industry in Colombia, made up of operating companies, namely Esso-Mobil, BP-Amoco, Occidental, Hocol, Texaco, Petrobras, Shell, Chevron, & Ocensa, with full support of the state-owned company Ecopetrol and the Colombian Safety Council, have been pursuing a cooperative process that encompasses and effectively unifies the various HSE programs among all oil industry contractors. Therefore, a joint set of minimum common standards was established in order to promote and demand the same requirements from industry contractors based on each company's specific HSE systems and as per Colombian legislation. They were structured according to ISO 9000 and ISO 14001 standards.