PEOPLE and SYSTEMS

For those of you involved in joint integrity management, the following information will not be a surprise…

Over the past number of weeks, I’ve been looking through the 11 years worth of non-conformance data that I’ve collected from various sites within the oil/gas, chemical and petrochemical industries that Zulu has been involved in and decided to share;

The data comes from compliance audits and findings from daily maintenance, projects and turnarounds/shutdowns.

There are many reasons why a joint integrity program will fail and typically they can be broken down into 5 distinct areas that can be further sub-divided. Unsurprisingly, the main reasons revolve around people and system non-conformances – interestingly both are linked..

By far – the highest percentage of non-conformances raised relates to PEOPLE followed by SYSTEMS

Predominantly the PEOPLE non-conformances arise from skill and working incompetency’s, lack of training, human error/human factors (deliberate and genuine mistakes), poor supervision and poor record keeping, whereas the most common SYSTEMS non-conformances relate to the failure to follow existing joint integrity procedures.

Its all a bit worrying and in my humble opinion the PEOPLE issues are still unacceptably high. In the UK, we’ve missed a generation of apprentices, we have an ageing workforce and we still unfortunately have a substantial number of ‘chancers’ and incompetent workers (particularly within the transient contractor labour pool). Joint integrity qualifications such as ECITB, ASME and BSEN are certainly helping to ascertain a level of proving competence but I believe there’s still a long way to go.

Considering that 93% of all data was based on top tier COMAH sites, that makes it even more worrying and therefore very important to address.

I’m more than willing to share further details* – just message me or contact me chrism@zulujointintegrity.co.uk

*Not including asset owner and site details

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