Abstract
There is a veritable sub-economy within our industry of professionals, academics, consultants and others deeply invested in analyzing, understanding and solving the age-old problem of improving the reliability, availability and predictability of our production assets. The hard data for production availability is well known within each company and is not the subject of this paper so will not be discussed or presented here but would not be a stretch to quote numbers on the order of +10% loss in availability due to reliability events as a common performance number in our industry. So how could it be that the cost and value of lost availability of our oil and gas producing assets (Not to mention the downstream refining and chemical processing assets) attributed to component and system breakdowns is still quite staggering today almost 30 years after the first academics penned the term "High Reliability Organization"? When we posed this question in Shell 10 years ago it lead down a very interesting path that began to point out what may be missing in our engineering/technical formulations and paradigms that may be contributing. This paper attempts to talk about the part of this journey that lead us to see "Problem Solving" in a much different light.
