Abstract
Over the past four years a new program for the management of health, safety and environmental performance of companies directly, or indirectly contracted to BPX(Alaska) has been developed. This program introduced substantial and fundamental changes in the roles and responsibilities of the parties involved.
Historically the E&P company, or customer, identified the risks related to a contract. Contractor programs frequently lacked structure, contractual responsibilities were often loosely defined and requirements varied amongst contracts. The introduction of new, global corporate performance expectations, the need to improve contractor incident rates, changing regulatory requirements, fundamental changes in customer - contractor relationships and a desire to achieve a zero-incident workplace were among the motivations for the development of a new contractor HSE system.
The cornerstones of the new program are a uniform set of contractor expectations and the use of contract specific risk identification, performed by the customer and contractor in partnership. An eight step process has been developed: definition of scope-of-work; analysis of gaps between customer expectations and contractor systems; identification of hazards related to contracted activities; assessment of risks associated with identified hazards; development of a Plan to manage risks; agreement of interfaces between customer, contractor and other parties; communication of the Plan and Interfaces; periodic review.
The paper describes, in detail both the development and the application of the new program. The implementation of the program in a group of fifteen contracts, representing direct, third-party or sub-contractor and alliance relationships with BPX(Alaska) is used as a case study. This case study: considers the ability of the various organizations involved in the process to understand and learn from the assurance process; compares the risk based safety management process to the previous, rules based process; reviews the impact of the variety of contractor management systems in use amongst the subject organizations.
