Mike Brady

The way in which Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are used to support maintenance processes in many asset intensive industries (like oil and gas) is often stuck in a vicious cycle that not only fails to deliver on efficiency gains but actually destroys value.   Poor quality master data and repair history data mean that the preventive maintenance (PM) schedules produced automatically by the ERP system are not trusted. Not only does this force maintenance managers to do their planning on side applications or spreadsheets it means that the benefit of seamless integration with the ERP’s material requirements planning and procurement modules becomes heavily impaired.   This makes the forward planning of materials and specialist services purchasing more problematic leading to frequent postponement of maintenance work due to non-availability of materials.   Such churn in the maintenance schedule requires further manual re-planning contributing to a desce...

I spent 6 months carrying out a management system assessment on a offshore facilities and subsea infrastructure development project.  The project had just passed the Financial Investment Decision stage and the operator (a global super-major) had a growing project team of circa 70 people working alongside the EPC contractor's team. So what I learnt was: a lot about the technical challenges and processes involved in getting oil and gas out of the ground.  For an accountant, and consultant, with a wide industry experience and a high level "head office" view of what actually happens in the oil field, this project provided a rapid deepening of my knowledge of how the upstream oil and gas industry works. the challenge of getting a physically remote project team, staffed mainly with contractors, to comply with the global policies and standards as well as the fundamental role project leadership plays in meeting that challenge for major development projec...

Corporate dashboards will often bring together a series of metrics that are intended to give a balanced view of how the whole organisation or a division, directorate or department is performing.   It is often the case that health and safety performance indicators will appear alongside those traditionally used to drive financial performance of the business such as sales, production, utilisation, costs and head count.   The increasing importance of Health and Safety, and hence the desire to improve performance, has been driven in part by the clearly growing negative consequences of failure to protect employees and the public, but also the increasing desire for organisations to be seen as agents of good in the community. There is, however, a danger that an executive viewing an improving trend on his Health and Safety metrics may be misled into thinking that this improving trend will continue.   With other measures, like improving sales or improving efficiency, it will o...