Optimising Offshore Operations Through Innovative Verification Services: Insights from Bureau Veritas’ UK Verification Manager

What is the fundamental nature of Operational Verification, and how does Bureau Veritas undertake this service? 

Under the Safety Case Regulations, Duty Holders are required to define the Major Accident Hazards (MAHs) of their assets and provide a Safety Case highlighting the provisions in place that the MAHs are effectively managed and controlled. The Regulations require the Duty Holder to define Safety and Environmental Critical Elements (SECEs) and ensure they remain suitable. 

Verification is the process conducted by an Independent Competent Person (ICP) to confirm that adequate assurance is taking place. Under this "goal setting" approach, the emphasis is on Duty Holders, with the support of the industry, to continuously maintain and improve safe operational environments. 

Bureau Veritas is a UKAS 17020 (8068) accredited Type A inspection body already providing Operational Verification services for many Duty Holders and their UK offshore assets. Verification Activities align with the defined Assurance Activities within the asset's Performance Standards. This process involves Bureau Veritas attending offshore installations to perform witness, visual, and audit examinations, assuring that the Duty Holder is maintaining the installation's SECEs and that they remain suitable for the operating conditions of the platform. Any deviations or potential improvements of the assurance process are then highlighted to the Duty Holder so that they can be resolved in a timely manner. 

How can Bureau Veritas' Verification services help offshore operators improve the overall efficiency of their operations? 

Bureau Veritas have developed a bespoke digital tool known as BV Compliance to efficiently manage the process of planning, reporting, tracking, recording and monitoring the service and its Findings. 

By digitising the service of Verification, Bureau Veritas has simplified the project management aspect allowing our Verifiers to focus on the effectiveness of the assurance. Leveraging the data enables them to offer additional layers of value in terms of insight to effectiveness of the assurance, SECE performance, reliability and predictive analytics. 

Trending Finding data provides a transparent overview to the operator of where gaps are occurring. Benchmarking against similar assets through anonymised and aligned data enables insights to performance and highlights potentially unknown issues. Such an approach supports the streamlining of service processes, enhances process safety and therefore positively impacts on production uptime.

How does Bureau Veritas add additional value to Verification Findings? 

Our Verifiers are trained and supported to write Findings that are clear and unambiguous, supporting our clients to understand the problem and have line of sight of the solution. 

All Findings raised are aligned to the relevant Verification Scheme and Performance Standard data as well as tagged with key words, allowing us to make our Verifiers aware of open Findings for the same issue as well as historic Findings and trends that might be related to or indicate reoccurring issue. With this analysis of data, our Verifiers can provide insight to the underlying causes rather than continual patching of superficial symptoms. 

Our ICPs don’t operate in isolation, they are supported by a local and global network of subject matter experts and are enabled to reach out to them as required to ensure they are delivering maximum value. 

How does Bureau Veritas support shared learning in their Findings process?

Bureau Veritas believe in learning from others and adapting. Bureau Veritas actively takes part in membership meetings and forums, engaging with participants not only in the oil and gas sector, but across the vast array of industry sectors we operate in pulling on resources and intelligence relevant to a robust Verification process. 

Lessons learned are identified and raised in our BV Compliance service tool where they are reviewed and approved by our technical team to confirm the validity and anonymity of the information before being cascaded to all our IVB clients. This active methodology of capturing key learnings and best practices means we share to Duty Holders our cross operator and asset experiences. 

How does Bureau Veritas deal with the fluid nature of offshore operations and logistics?

Operational activities, although meticulously planned, are highly susceptible to last-minute changes due to plant and personnel availability. 

Bureau Veritas assigns core teams to each contract, supported by a pool of skilled, experienced Verifiers with a range of core expertise. By maintaining access to this pool, we can swiftly adapt to operational changes, providing clients with reliable and consistent service that suits their operational requirements. 

Our core team is at the heart of our operations, but at the same time, we have learned the benefit of enabling our people to be utilised across the board in terms of sharing best practices and meeting the needs of operational flexibility. 

The appointment of a new IVB can create an arduous task for a Duty Holder. How does Bureau Veritas support and streamline this transition?

At Bureau Veritas, we recognise that Verification is a crucial service for a Duty Holder and that its performance is critical to the integrity of the assets and the organisation's legal compliance. This can make the realisation of increased value from changing providers a difficult decision to make. For this reason, we have developed our internal process to ensure we support our clients in each impacted area. This plan has been developed over several applications, with lessons learned feeding its development. 

Our assigned senior project manager, supported by a team with experience in previous transitions, will ensure that this well-developed plan is communicated and implemented for each critical touch point. By supporting new clients with our experience in this process, we reduce the risk and maximise the efficiency of the change to minimise the impact on a Duty Holder's operations, safety, and compliance. 

Furthermore, we have designed our systems to allow our clients the flexibility to manage the Findings we raise directly, either from our own system with logins to our cloud-based service tool BV Compliance or by integrating them into their own action-tracking tools and dashboards. 

Bureau Veritas understands that organisations managing their own data can provide greater ownership and control should changes be implemented. In further support of this choice, we provide the option for enabling Application Program Interfacing (API) for data to be directly transferred, avoiding manual updating between organisations, and enabling swift communication of emerging risks to be addressed. 

How does Bureau Veritas differentiate itself from other Verification service providers in the industry? 

As well as having a team of experienced and competent individuals, we instil a pragmatic and proactive mentality into our team to ensure our Duty Holder clients receive a layer of additional value to the assurance process that drives a continual improvement philosophy. 

We leverage our position as a leading IVB to share our learnings from across the assets we work on, and we are effectively organised to make us resilient to operational change. 

As an organisation of 83,000 employees in 140 countries, we provide a global reach that reduces logistical costs and environmental impact while providing our local teams with the support of technical experts in all energy and environmental engineering areas. 

Bureau Veritas has a vast service portfolio that reaches all stages of the energy asset life cycle, and our size and global reach mean we are well positioned to support the dynamic nature of our energy industry clients when and where they need it.