For a good performance of the contractors’ activity, a close collaboration with our partners is crucial. Contractors perform more than 65% of the total work hours recorded at the Company level; therefore, their skills and performance are vital to carry out our work safely and responsibly.
It is our Company’s decision to collaborate only with those contractors that meet our safety standards. Therefore, in 2020 we worked for the implementation of the revised version of the “Contractor HSSE Management”, Group Standard. The new document, which requests a unique HSSE conduct during the entire lifecycle of a contract, is to be generally followed by all OMV and OMV Petrom employees and specifically applied by those employees with safety responsibilities (Contract Owner, Contract Holder, Contract User, Responsible Manager and HSSE representative).
These appointed responsible persons have important roles in the pre-qualification and selection of contractors, as well as in the supervision of the HSSE performance of those contractors and subcontractors involved in the execution phase.
Considering this, a cross-divisional and interdepartmental workgroup took the recorded at the Company level; therefore, their skills and performance are vital to carry out our work safely and responsibly.
It is our Company’s decision to collaborate only with those contractors that meet our safety standards. Therefore, in 2020 we worked for the implementation of the revised version of the “Contractor HSSE Management”, Group Standard. The new document, which requests a unique HSSE conduct during the entire lifecycle of a contract, is to be generally followed by all OMV and OMV Petrom employees and specifically applied by those employees with safety responsibilities (Contract Owner, Contract Holder, Contract User, Responsible Manager and HSSE representative).
These appointed responsible persons have important roles in the pre-qualification and selection of contractors, as well as in the supervision of the HSSE performance of those contractors and subcontractors involved in the execution phase.
Considering this, a cross-divisional and interdepartmental workgroup took the responsibility of developing the training material for this new standard. The same group organized workshops for presentation and debates on this new document’s provisions, with a focus on the changes in boundaries, roles and responsibilities. The workshops’ outcome has been shared with the participants to other similar workshops. In this way, colleagues involved in contracts from different business sectors received the same answers and gained the same understanding about the new regulation. In parallel, the new standard was presented in the periodical meetings with contractors that were organised at the business level, aiming the transfer of the good practices and the reiteration of the obligation for contractors to apply the rules of this standard to their contracted activities, the jobs performed by subcontractors.
The daily activity of contractors is carefully planned, coordinated and monitored by our representatives. All procedures for managing their HSSE activity are regulated by the same OMV Group Standard “Contractor HSSE Management” that addresses the entire contract lifecycle aspects, from selection of contractors to the contract closure. The Contract Holders, the appointed managers of contracts, involve from the early stage of the contract a HSSE representative who will advise on the implementation of the standard provisions. Legal and internal OMV Petrom HSSE documents are set up in all stages of the contract, aiming to regulate the collaboration and knowledge transfer between the two parts. All these elements are an important support for monitoring the HSSE performance of contractors. In this respect, at the beginning of the contracts a HSSE Bridging Document or a Convention between OMV Petrom and the contractor, which contains the decision on HSSE procedures to be followed during the contract. Also, before starting the contract is established, in relevant cases, OMV Petrom performs pre-start-up audits, resulting in some cases in improvement action plans having in scope HSSE compliance with OMV Petrom expectations and a good HSSE performance during the contract execution. It follows the most complex phase, the contract execution, when HSSE is part of all activities, always the first on the agenda and considered in any process or proposed change.
The contractors’ employees are part of our professional family, part of them being daily engaged in our activity and living their professional life in the same culture with us, some being just occasionally involved in construction, modernization, drilling and other important activities. Their activity is continuously under the care of our supervisors and their presence. Their health condition and safety are equally important as that of our colleagues. For a proper monitoring of their activity, contractors’ employees are registered since entering our sites, through badging systems in refinery or at OMV Petrom headquarters to permit to work system and documentation. All contractors and their subcontractors receive the HSSE induction training when starting a contract. They are daily trained to recognize, manage, and report HSSE risks and hazards and contribute continuously together with our colleagues to disseminate lessons learned from hazards, near misses, and incidents.
The Health and Safety management performance of our contractors is a constant concern for us. Therefore, for each high and medium HSSE risk contract, HSSE key performance indicators are established. The indicators are monitored and the results are analysed in regular meetings between OMV Petrom and contractors’ management. The Service Quality Meetings are organized to discuss other different aspects, such as HSSE audits, incidents, and lessons learned. The Permit of Work System, available and active in both Upstream and Downstream Divisions, is one of the main tools used for proper HSSE training when starting a job. Its defined procedures help the involvement of all OMV Petrom workers involved in a job to identify hazards and assess, mitigate and control possible risks. All these elements are documented. The evidence of all persons involved and of the job safety analyses performed are permanently available at the working place and archived at dedicated working points.
We ensure that contractors and subcontractors working on our premises receive the basic safety awareness training and that they are qualified, as legally required, for the job they perform. Therefore, in addition to the regular HSSE induction that any contractor and sub-contractor receive when starting a new contract on OMV Petrom sites or to the daily HSSE job preparation through Toolbox Talks and Job Safety Analyses, according to the Permit to Work System in 2020, we continued to identify solutions for the implementation of the “HSSE Passport for Contractors” project also in Downstream Division. The HSSE Passport was started in 2019 in Upstream and consists of a training course delivered by HSSE internal trainers in all business units, with no cost for our contractors and subcontractors, finalized with a test and individual badge with a unique QR code used to verify the qualification and to consequently grant the access to the working site.
Even if the COVID-19 period’s restrictions did not give us the chance to perform some activities in normal conditions, we adapted our previous practices to online activities. All periodical HSSE forums with contractors were held by following similar structures with the previous meetings, with the involvement of both OMV Petrom and contractors’ representatives in presenting good HSSE practices, learnings from incidents, HSSE performance analyses, and rewarding for good safety behaviour. The same approach was adopted for the meetings between OMV Petrom and contractors’ representatives, in individual contracts, those meetings for quarterly analysis of HSSE performance and identification of improvements – Service Quality Meetings.
We continued in 2020 the HSSE management system audits, considering both aspects of guidance for best practices and the implementation of corrective measures where non-conformities are identified. The difficulty of having meetings at contractors’ premises or organizing site visits forced the auditors to do most of the activities remotely. This new approach had an important influence on the effort invested by both parties, the auditors and the auditees, because of the time resources needed to share and check documents, perform different analyses on them and have online interviews and clarification. We performed audits in both Upstream and Downstream divisions, called cross-divisional contractors (2 audits), but also performed 17 HSSE Management Systems audits for contractors that operate in different areas like projects, workover and drilling, maintenance, waste management, in each division and by following the audit plan proposed at the beginning of the year.
For all HSSE MS audits performed, we used the standardized audit tool provisioned by the recently revised Group HSSE Audit Standard. We continue the audits by monitoring the achievement of the actions assumed by the management of the audited companies, a process that is facilitated by the new reporting tool Synergi, implemented in OMV Petrom starting with 2020 and to which also contractors’ representatives have access.
In 2020, we started to be more focused on subcontractors’ activity. This is equally important because of their low HSSE performance in the last years and because we consider that the triangle “beneficiary-contractor-subcontractor” has to be always on the same level of HSSE awareness and culture. Several departments started to look for improvement initiatives, from the Compliance department, where a new project established a better registration of subcontractors’ list in our internal systems, to Procurement Department, where their acceptance for involvement is better monitored and also to HSSE. The HSSE Department approach was to identify a concept for improvement; therefore, they organized a workgroup, with involvement from different functions from both divisions, to manage this aspect. The Group’s approach was to first perform a gap analysis against the existing internal requirements; they gathered information about incidents, abnormal situations that were noticed in different activities, and weaknesses in the management performed by our contractors in relation to their sub-contracted activities. This gap analysis resulted in proposals for six different focus areas to be better managed in the next period. Therefore, we designed six individual projects that will be implemented step by step in the upcoming period.