Key Performance Indicators

A workgroup was established in 2005 to determine if a set of industry wide KPI’s could be agreed with a view to benchmarking performance to assess asset integrity and promote improvement.

This initiative has been brought about following HSE concerns, as raised in the KP3 Report, of how industry deals with process safety.  The offshore oil and gas industry, through Oil & Gas UK, needs to be able to demonstrate to the HSE and media that the industry as a whole has a handle on process safety and is improving through high investment and effective management systems.  Key performance indicators which signify a improving trend in asset integrity will provide the tangible evidence of industry’s performance.

The criteria for the KPI’s were that:

– they present meaningful information that can be trended over time

– they comprise data that is readily available to all or most operators with little or no further effort to collect and report

– they are consistently defined across operators

Three broad concepts were identified which met this criteria and workgroups were established to investigate the forward options:

- hydrocarbon releases (existing KPI collated by HSE)
- verification non-compliance issues
- safety critical backlog (replaced production uptime/plant efficiency in 2008)

Data on hydrocarbon releases has been collated and regulated for some years by the HSE and a 10% year-on-year reduction target for major and significant releases is monitored.

The two further KPI’s are not regulated and therefore the data is requested through the Oil & Gas UK Production Forum.  A further workgroup was established in 2007 to refine the data requests and formulate a more suitable KPI in place of Plant Efficiency which was deemed to be a relatively poor surrogate indicator for asset integrity.

The workgroup followed on from industry discussions on backlog issues to develop a new KPI on safety critical backlog.  Such an indicator would also address the first point on the HSE eleven-point letter to Oil & Gas UK following the Key Programme 3 report in 2007.