Learn How Companies Can Drive Better Business Decisions Through Compliance

Join JWN and featured sponsor Siemens in a Live Webinar that will tackle the most pressing compliance related issues facing companies today.

In advance of the webinar — click here to register — we sat down with John Lusty, Director of Energy & Utilities Solutions at Siemens Industry Software Ltd., to learn more about the topics that will be discussed.

1) How can companies drive better business decisions through compliance?

John Lusty: While the oil & gas industry seems to have turned the corner, most industry participants are still straining to reduce overhead while increasing efficiencies. The costs associated with compliance and quality management are part fixed and part variable, but there’s never been a better time to optimize those costs while avoiding the unnecessary impact of non-compliance. By taking an enterprise approach and consolidating silos of information, the cost-benefit of business decisions that are compliance related can be better understood and more consistently executed. The application of optimized compliance workflows and configurable status reporting can assist in ensuring that decisions made resulting from audits, assessments and corrective actions are actioned using a customer-defined standard methodology. Over time, a highly managed compliance and quality information system becomes a significant risk management tool for managers and executives trying to make better decisions to increase process efficiencies, while reducing the chance that some of those hard-earned gains will be eroded due to quality and compliance infractions.

2) How can companies better control regulatory documentation and contingency planning?

JL: Taking an enterprise approach to compliance management provides energy companies with a framework for creating, modifying and versioning, approving, releasing and archiving all compliance documentation. Consistency in these important areas is achieved by automating customer-defined templates and workflows designed to meet internal and external requirements every time and on time, while also generating an audit of trail that records what happened, when and by whom in case that’s needed later. These same capabilities can be used in contingency planning to ensure that organizations respond to unexpected events in a way that is consistent with their internal and external requirements. Furthermore, given that different regulatory reporting regions and business units may have different requirements based on the user’s location, the ability to include that uniqueness while maintaining continuity is critical.

3) How do companies deal with the increasingly onerous requirements for social acceptance?

JL: The oil & gas industry in Canada has been under intense scrutiny from many audiences with many different interests and agendas and that will not change. The best way for companies not to put their social license to operate at risk is to not become a target in the first place. By taking a structured approach to consistently follow internal and external procedures for compliance and quality management is a foundational step. With this in place, operational excellence objectives such as operator training, asset integrity management, risk and regulatory reporting, corrective and preventative actions all become more achievable. With society’s requirements for companies to operate as expected, while keeping up with the changes that people, markets and governments expect of them, it’s not going to get easier. However, by adding a structured framework for how we manage those tasks consistently and completely, we are putting employees in a better position to make those tasks less onerous and fully achievable.

4) What about environmental compliance?

JL: Everything we’ve discussed so far is equally applicable to the subject of environmental compliance as the cost of non-compliance can threaten a company’s existence. It’s a reasonable objective that by having properly trained employees working safely in a manner that complies with internal and external regulations, in a culture that strives for operational excellence, that the risk of an event threatening the environment should be minimized. That being said, it is nearly impossible to reduce risks to zero anywhere. Should an event occur that, it will be critical for companies to be able to demonstrate that a high level of due diligence to prevent the incident was taken, and to prove that they did everything that was required and that could be reasonably expected of them to prevent it from happening. This will be useful both as a basis to support their actions, but also to update and improve policies and procedures to reduce the risk of a similar event happening again.

5) What do you hope participants will get from the Siemens compliance webinar?

JL: Our intent is to be able to educate participants on how Siemens solutions and expertise can add structure and predictability to their compliance and quality management, while reducing the cost and increasing their efficiency to do so. Quality and compliance are foundational to every part of the organization and can improve profitability if managed effectively. It’s another example of how the Siemens Digital Enterprise can be applied to make the Canadian energy industry more efficient, innovative and sustainable for the long term.

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