Perspectives

Smooth and simple: the benefits of standardising your safety cases

Oil & gas

We’ve seen an increasing number of enquiries about standardising safety cases

Safety cases are all about operating safely: so how can you handle them more easily while staying safe and compliant?

More organisations are turning to safety case standardisation to maintain their competitive edge.

Proactivity is key here. Safety cases are all about operating safely: so how can you handle them more easily while staying safe and compliant?

At Marex, we do a lot of safety case management. Clients like our rigorous approach to making their compliance easier. However, we’re seeing an increasing number of enquiries about standardising safety cases across the entire organisation.

It’s a natural progression from the fairly reactive approach of managing the regulatory necessity of safety cases to proactively going out and implementing it efficiently and well.

For many reasons, this is an attractive idea.

Firstly, it can help to improve safety performance. A consistent and structured approach to risk assessment and management allows the opportunity to identify and address hazards more effectively.

And straight off, standardisation eliminates the need to develop and maintain multiple different safety case formats.

People and assets

Then we can look at two different aspects, the people and the assets.

If safety cases are designed to satisfy different regulators while keeping a familiar format, it suddenly makes assets more flexible to move across different regions. It reduces turnaround time, and team members transferring between assets don’t have to absorb entirely new documents. It saves both time and money.

Equally, well-designed safety cases are simple and clear for the workforce.

They contain the right level of detail with the ability to refer to previous versions, use language that’s easy to understand with a consistent lay-out that suits every user, regardless of their role.

They free up time as they’re easy to navigate and understand, and maintain confidence by presenting information in a logical and structured way.

And that’s before we get to the regulators themselves. Inspectors will thank you for giving them the information they need to assess safety performance in a simple and straightforward way. And in reducing the risk of audit findings, it’s easier to demonstrate that you’re meeting the regulator’s requirements.

Consult the experts

So where does Marex come in?

With our extensive and up-to-date experience and expertise, we work with a consistent set of major hazards and risk control measures. We understand best practice and innovation across workplaces in hazardous environments worldwide.

To give an example of a standardisation project, deepwater drilling contractor Seadrill asked Marex to standardise their emergency response procedures.

They operate globally across a number of different coastal states, each of which are subject to a specific set of national regulations, and wanted to maintain a practical tool that was compliant to specific local regulatory requirements.

And if you want to read more about how we approach safety cases, there’s a good example here from Well-Safe Solutions. They acquired the Ocean Guardian semi-submersible drilling unit intending to convert it into a bespoke plug and abandonment unit – so needed a new safety case submission.

In fact, they then went on to install a saturated diving spread on the Guardian which introduced new factors to consider when preparing a safety case, not least a new critical area with living quarters.

Find out how they dealt with a revision of the full suite of formal safety assessments here.

Safety cases are specialist documents so it makes sense that you’d get a specialist to look after it. If you want to be proactive and standardise the safety cases across your organisation, it’s outsourcing to experts.

Marex: get in touch to find out how we can make your compliance easier.

Perspectives