Success Stories
Compton Petroleum
Since its inception in 1993, Compton Petroleum has focused on growing production and reserves in Western Canada, building a reputation as one of Canada’s leading intermediate exploration and production companies. In the first half of 2009, its average daily production of oil and natural gas was 22,312 barrels of oil equivalent (boe/d), a significant increase from the 150 (boe/d) it produced in 1993. Looking forward, Compton is dedicated to providing strong returns on its growth activities, developing its sizable long-life asset base which will result in long-term value for shareholders.
- George Collin
Compton’s Director of EH&S and Corporate Compliance
Like all exploration and production companies, Compton’s growth strategy relies on contractors to perform much of the work required to get oil and gas out of the ground, from water haulers and welders to drilling and downhole tool companies. Compton’s increased production has necessitated the use of an ever increasing number of contractors.
By 2009, it did business with literally thousands of these service providers, and its paper-based processes for managing their health, safety and environmental (HSE) compliance was taking up an ever increasing amount of resources that could be put to better use further increasing production.
"It was your classic case of contractors sending in their insurance and WCB papers, and staff keeping files and files and files of those papers as the contractor list continued to grow," says George Collin, Compton’s Director, EH&S and Corporate Compliance, since May of 2009. "With any paper-based system, there’s limited oversight of the adequacy or currency of the paper work, as well as of the contractor approval list and how companies get on it."
The true cost of inefficient compliance management
Clearly, the costs of manually managing HSE compliance are significant. The salaries of the staff required to manage the paperwork and paying for file storage are the most obvious, but the costs can also be found in the field. The time it takes to determine if a contractor is in compliance can result in a high-cost rig sitting idle on a drill site for days. Production may have to be shut down longer than necessary while repairs to a pipeline or processing facility are put on hold until a contractor addresses lapses in his HSE requirements. Added together, these types of preventable costs and lost revenues can dwarf the cost of compliance management itself.
"Throughout my career there have been several scenarios where we’ve had to send contractors home because they didn’t have the proper tickets," recounts Collin. "That costs everybody downtime, but ultimately the real cost would be in the unlikely event there’s a major incident and it turns out the producer hasn’t done its due diligence because the contractor’s paperwork was filed when it came in and no one has looked at it since."
The value of HSE compliance management
When Collin joined Compton, the company had reached the point in its growth where it needed a system to better manage its contractors. "This was an area where we needed improvement, better processes, better management," he explains. "Based on my experience at previous companies, I recognized that ComplyWorks had the solution."
What made ComplyWorks such a good fit for Compton was the fact that it would support the producer’s business practices and values. Beyond helping Compton better meet its regulatory requirements around due diligence, ComplyWorks’ Canadian HSE Registry implements Compton’s HSE compliance requirements as opposed to a generic set of requirements hard-wired into the software. It also allows Compton to develop business rules that enforce compliance in ways that make the most sense for it.
"The program lets our operations folks in the field see which contractors are approved for the services they need. They can see which contractors are flagged for not meeting Compton’s standards, and the nature of the flag," Collin explains. "For some flags, the person in the field will have to get a higher level of approval to use the contractor. For other flags, both the operations person at Compton and the contractor will know that the contractor can’t be hired until a specific condition is met. In those cases, the field operator can actually search the Canadian HSE Registry for another contractor, and have some assurance that contractor meets Compton’s standards. Because they’re already familiar with the Canadian HSE Registry, registering those new companies is much more efficient and much faster."
Just as important as enforcing HSE compliance standards is how ComplyWorks helps Compton develop win-win relationships with contractors that share its values. "You get contractors that have the same safety values as Compton," says Collin. "Ensuring that all of our worksites are safe and nobody gets hurt is probably the biggest benefit we get from ComplyWorks."
Developed with both the employer and the contractor in mind, ComplyWorks set out from the start to bring together the HSE compliance needs of each. Unlike some compliance solutions that may inadvertently create an adversarial relationship by making the compliance process overly burdensome for contractors, ComplyWorks allows employers to implement programs that are as flexible or rigid as necessary.
"We rely heavily on contractors to do a lot of critical work, so we try to build positive working relationships," says Collin. "We’re looking for ways in which we can encourage contractors to meet our needs and we felt the Canadian HSE Registry was a reasonable process with a reasonable cost.
"I’m encouraged by the vision and the proactiveness of ComplyWorks to come up with solutions and be willing to entertain input from the user groups on both sides, contractors and employers, in order to provide more value added services along the whole chain of compliance."
Sword Energy
With operations spanning four provinces–Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba–privately–owned Sword Energy engages over 1200 contractors to perform a wide variety of oilfield services. These range from one– or two–man businesses that provide a specialized service in a local area, up to large drilling companies that routinely send rigs across provincial borders. Sword Energy also employs consultants, many of whom aren’t familiar with all the contractors on the producer’s approved vendor list and may have their own list of contractors they’ve worked with in the past.
- Laurent St. Louis
Safety Advisor at Sword Energy
These are just two of the complicating factors that all oil and gas companies, Sword Energy included, contend with when implementing a system to manage the HSE information for their safety program. In the past, most companies relied on fax machines and filing cabinets to manage the health, safety and environment information of all these contractors, or they would divert their IT resources from the core business of discovering and producing petroleum to developing automated HSE systems in-house.
"ComplyWorks gives us a mechanism to save money when setting up a contractor management system," says Laurent St. Louis, Safety Advisor at Sword Energy. "They also incorporate our ideas and ideas from other producers and contractors, so all of their members get more services and value than they would with something built in-house."
Built for the industry, with industry input
One of the aspects of ComplyWorks that appealed to Sword Energy, one of the original members of ComplyWorks’ Canadian HSE Registry, is that it was designed to flexibly meet the needs of its members’ industries. Instead of forcing a onesize-fits-all solution on producers and contractors, ComplyWorks provides Sword Energy with pre-set questions based on input from organizations such as Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and the Petroleum Services Association of Canada (PSAC), as well as the requirements of relevant provincial legislation.
"It’s easy to understand and work with, and very much oriented to how we do business in Alberta and other provinces," explains St. Louis. The built-in flexibility of ComplyWorks also lets Sword Energy collect, manage and monitor the HSE information they need from all their vendors–one–or two–man shops up to international companies providing comprehensive oilfield services–without putting undue strain on them by only requiring information that’s relevant to the risk associated with the work they perform.
"At the end of the day, you have to make the system work for everyone. We take contractor data, analyze it and determine whether it meets our intent. They may have written their story slightly different, but whether they meet our requirements is what’s important, not how they word it," explains St. Louis. "ComplyWorks has made the system work for us, instead of making us work for the system."
Streamlined Communications With Contractors
From day one, ComplyWorks has consulted with both producers and contractors to ensure its solution meets their needs. Through user groups and surveys, ComplyWorks identifies new features that benefit both groups and create win-win relationships. It then works with companies, including Sword Energy, to develop those features and make them available across its membership.
"If our ideas work well, or if someone else’s ideas work well, then let’s all use them," says St. Louis. "By taking those ideas and building them into the system, ComplyWorks provides us all with a tremendous value add."
Take ComplyWorks’ communications capabilities, for example. It developed the feature after one producer requested a way to quickly and easily send safetyprogram updates to all of the contractors on its approved list.
Today Sword Energy uses that feature, called InformWorks, to keep the 1200 contractors it works with informed and up to date. "Within minutes, I can send new guidelines or changes to how we do business to all of our contractors and let them know how it affects them in the field," says St. Louis. "It’s a great tool."
Lower Costs, Lower Incident And Injury Rates
The bottom line for Sword Energy is that ComplyWorks saves money and improves safety. Over the years, ComplyWorks has proven that it does both. Originally, Sword Energy even paid the membership fees for some of its smaller contractors. "Early on to get contractors on board, we paid for some of their memberships because we saw the value of having them in the system. At the end of the day, it saved us time," St. Louis explains. As those smaller companies began using their ComplyWorks membership to do work for other producers, they too saw the value and began paying for their memberships.
Even more important than the lower costs has been the lower incident and injury rates. ComplyWorks has played a role in Sword Energy experiencing a steady decrease in recorded incidents by contractors at its sites. Those contractors have also experienced lower overall recordable incident rates, as St. Louis can tell from the Alberta WCB data on each contractor that he can access through ComplyWorks.
"We see that as the internal systems and safety programs at each contractor get better, their number of recordable incidents gets lower. That saves us all money," St. Louis states. More importantly, it also saves lives. "Safety is a shared value. Everyone wants to go home at night."