Pathways to Make Driving Inherently Safer within the Service Company's Operations
Authors: Peresypkin Sergey , Guariento Alessandro 
Published: November 2015

"I trust that this sort of nonsense will never happen again"- reportedly said the Coroner at the investigation enquiry of the very first motor vehicle accident in 1896. Since then, and until the present day, motor vehicle fatalities remain one of our primary workplace concerns in the Oil and Gas industry. According to the latest IOGP statistics, 7.7% of our industry's work-related fatalities occurred due to land transport activities. Land transport incidents also accounted for 2 out of every 5 fatal work injuries in the US under OSHA incident reporting guidelines. This concern is not limited to the Oil and Gas sector or the United States but is notable in other industries and geographies across the globe.

In risk management, an "inherently safer" approach implies an attempt to eliminate or, at least, reduce the severity and likelihood of incident occurrence through careful attention to fundamental design and layout. In this context, we examined whether this approach can be applied and be effective in managing transportation safety where, historically, most of the responsibility for safe driving has been placed on the individual driver and less on the design of the transportation system and features of the equipment. We challenged the premise of our entire transportation system and adopted a more holistic "safe in design" approach which not only focused on the human behavior and attitude of the person behind the wheel, but designed a safer sytem for the driver, including driver support, operations management and vehicle safety aspects of the transportation process.

Baker Hughes Middle East Asia Pacific (MEAP) HSE organization embarked on the ambitious undertaking to overhaul the transport safety management program by addressing the three critical aspects of Driver, Vehicle, and Journey Management system by doing the following: Upgraded our fleet management system to become electronic and capable of not only passively tracking but proactively alerting to potential areas of concerns, which would further trigger immediate interventions.Created a new department with several organizational layers: journey management operators, transport supervisors, driver trainers, etc.Developed a new set of rules and communicated to them to driving and management level personnel. These rules provided them not only with more authority but also with increased responsibility and accountability. Management must not only follow policy and procedures requirements, but also ensure they do not put their drivers in a "no-win" situation by compelling them to take unnecessary risks when planning a journey.Our driver training program was upgraded to address critical common safe driving techniques and skills, specific regional hazards, while improving the quality of training.Enhanced engineering requirements have been adopted to increase occupant safety, (e.g.: rollover protection).

This paper explains the changes which allowed our region and the company as a whole to accomplish outstanding results: improvement of motor vehicle rate by 58% and prevention of 63 motor vehicle accidents within one year.