Oil & gas safety group targets supervisor competency in new guide

oil and gas industrial siteThe safety association for Canada’s oil and gas industry has released two guidelines designed to help the industry achieve safety at worksites by enhancing supervisors’ performance and successfully hiring and managing contractors.

In a statement, Enform, the country’s safety association for the oil and gas industry, has release the Supervisor Competency and Contractor Management Systems guidelines “to help industry achieve superior site management.”

“Current events have made it all too clear that worksite and well site safety must be a priority for everyone involved in the petroleum industry,” Enform said in its statement.

Enform led a cross-industry team in developing the guidelines, which provide companies with principles, practices and tools that help guide employers and contractors to perform safely and professionally.

“Recognizing that one solution does not fit all users and situations, the guidelines take a broad view of upstream petroleum industry site operations and present accepted guiding principles that provide a useful starting point for employers seeking to establish supervisor competency or contractor management systems,” says Lloyd Harman, Enform’s vice-president of safety services.

The activities, knowledge and skills that are expected to enhance a supervisor’s performance are outlined in the Supervisor Competency Guideline, and are brought to life through the use of examples. The guideline also provides an outline to help build company-specific training matrix and tools that can be used by any organization to augment existing programs, Enform said.

The Contractor Management Systems Guideline, on the other hand, identifies six key steps for the successful hiring and management of contractor and service providers:

1. Defining the scope of work
2. Establishing contractor expectations
3. Conducting contractor pre-qualification and selection
4. Choosing and developing the appropriate agreement
5. Managing the contractor
6. Keeping records and exercising due diligence

These steps provide a process-based contractor management framework aligned with a plan-do-check-act system that can result in improved communication between hiring companies, contractors and the service providers they hire, according to Enform.

Canada’s leading oil and gas industry trade associations support the use of the guidelines to help companies of all sizes improve performance, Enform said.

“We were pleased to work with Enform on these guidelines and are in full support of their implementation,” says Dave Pryce, vice-president, Western Canadian Operations, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “These documents provide our members, and the industry as a whole, with a structure to move forward and better our practices.”

A free electronic version of the Supervisor Competency and Contractor Management Systems guidelines can be downloaded from the Enform site at www.enform.ca.