Abstract
Organization change, merger, or acquisition often raises concerns about the potential impact of the change on the health, safety and environmental performance of the business operations. Similar to other industries, mergers and acquisitions have occurred in the oil and gas industry. This paper describes one company's (the "Company") experience and approach to manage the risks of organizational changes on the health, environment and safety (HES) aspects. The approach applies the Antecedent, Behavior and Consequences (ABC) principle of Basic Behavior Base Safety by utilizing the Company's policies and Tenets of Operation as antecedent and the Company's Operational Excellence Management System (OEMS) and its processes and procedures as control tools in building the Company's safety culture.
The approach emphasizes the importance of leadership role in building safety culture and the Operational Excellence (OE) Management System, OE processes implementation, and strong participation from the personnel involved in safety critical work processes, including contractors. Areas such as experience, competence, responsibilities, accountability, and OE specific processes are discussed. These include how the Company developed the strategic focus to implement the OEMS, and prioritized and deployed the OE processes throughout the Company's organizations. Key activities included building leadership accountability by establishing the OE Leadership Team, building an OE culture through workforce engagement, deploying the Tenets of Operation and Stop Work Authority, and immediately reporting any incident including near miss (Flash Reporting). Several OE processes such as Incident Investigation & Reporting (IIR), Fundamental Safe Work Practices (FSWP), Contractor Health Environment Safety Management (CHESM), Behavior Based Safety (BBS), are discussed as examples. To promote the smooth deployment of the OE processes, organization capability was enhanced by filling in critical positions, refining and restructuring OE/HES organization, and developing people competency.
A historical performance review has shown that the approach has not only proven to be effective in reducing the risks associated with an acquisition but also has managed to enhance the HES performance of the Company.
