A holistic approach to safety management in offshore oil and gas industry

This paper describes a new safety management methodology applicable for engineering projects in oil & gas sector. In contrast with the traditional approachwhere multiple data bases and document management systems are needed, the proposed scheme presents a single point access to various safety scopes and related design, follow-up and feedback procedures as well as to various design documents. Once implemented in a software platform, this methodology can vastly improve efficiency and cost effectiveness of safety management in oil & gas industry. Due to its holistic nature, a quick and complete project overview is always available. The underlying architecture of this scheme is based on Safety Concern Codes with unique identification tags. Different types of safety concern codes can be defined according to the specific safety design areas. This methodology enables single point handling of multiple safety design areas, such as Technical safety, Environmental care, Risk assessment, Process safety, Working environment, etc. within the same management platform. Therefore, the effective use of this methodology is expected to vastly improve efficiency and cost effectiveness of safety management in oil & gas industry, while it can further lead to quick and comprehensive use of available information during decision making. Accordingly, the proposed methodology can achieve both the cost reduction and the enhanced safety.