Safety is a top priority for any oil and gas company, but for Honeywell, it’s the mission. Find out how the personal protection equipment supplier has become an all encompassing safety solutions consultant ready to tackle almost every challenge
Simply buying a few pieces of safety gear does not automatically make your facility safer. Safety regimes require complete commitment throughout all levels of a company, from top to bottom.
Honeywell Safety Products’ president, Jack Boss believes that the company’s expertise in a wide range of industries gives it the most competitive position as a safety company, one that can actually be a catalyst for a safer and more secure working environment.
Of course this begins with having the right assets and equipment to operate safely. “A lot of the major multinationals will look to Honeywell for a complete set of safety solutions, we are the only safety company with the complete head to toe offerings,” says Boss.
“There might be other companies which offer the headwear, or the footwear, but nobody has the complete package. So a lot of the major oil and gas companies will look to Honeywell, and ask us to come in and help them standardise their safety products and processes.”
The standardisation of industry safety regulations naturally helps companies conform to best practice. This commitment to safety has become more than just a passing fad, but an industry reality that all companies must abide to.
“The oil and gas industry here is regarded as a critical infrastructure with global focus, and there is certainly a lot of focus on infrastructure running smoothly,” says Boss. “If there is a hiccup here, then this can reflect in markets around the world. So it’s critical to everyone that safety comes into play,” he adds.
For Boss, the Middle East region actually presents the challenge of being a meeting point for regulations from different regions, making it a very unique market. “There is an amalgamation, or sort of a confluence of regulations that come here, because a lot of companies, whether they are US based or European based, they will bring their relative standards,” explains Boss.
In response to this bi-regulatory environment, Honeywell strives to meet both types of standards, allowing it to access customers from both sides of the Atlantic.
While the regulations that the company can handle may be vastly different, the goals are essentially the same.
“Safety is the company’s licence to operate, you cannot compromise on this,” says Boss. “It’s not so much of a trend, it’s more of the safety community within these oil and gas companies sharing best practice,” says Boss. “The leaders of the organisations, they do get together from time to time to share best practices because they want to keep the industry safe.”
With this increased pace of regulation and the emergence of HSE regimes driven by the growing awareness of safety throughout the industry, more companies are turning to operators such as Honeywell to help develop a culture of safety at the workplace.
Honeywell’s Culture of Safety aims to instill a mindset and behaviour to the industry. “It’s a more comprehensive approach than wearing personal protective equipment, it’s about making sure that the equipment they have is fit for the purpose or for the application that they are using it for,” he says.
While striving to instill a far reaching culture of safety, Honeywell has also developed the Safety Community interface. The software is designed to help health and safety managers maintain standards and compliance.
“The demands on the roles of safety managers are increasing, they spend much more time getting data, information and writing reports and not as much time actually solving the large safety issues,” says Boss.
“What we are actually trying to do is make them more productive, take the complexities that they face in getting data and information and make sure the workers are trained properly, and we’re simplifying all that so they can actually spend more time with the workers out on the field, solving and being more proactive in dealing with critical safety issues.”
What truly sets the company apart from the competition is its responsiveness to customer demands.
“We’re going out to an oil rig and looking at how people use the equipment, looking at safety and comfort and looking at how they use it and just really developing those human factors and that user experience in the development of personal protective equipment,” says Boss.
Fit like a glove
KCL is a glove manufacturer that works very closely with its customers by visiting their sites and studying all the risks that are associated with different parts of the facility. The company looks at the different chemicals that employees work with and examines the different hazardous environments they are in.
The company then tests the different types of gloves and materials to determine which products are most suitable for the environment they will be used in. “We go in and tell the customer that in certain parts of the plants, they are working with certain chemicals, and therefore the best solutions for them are certain types of gloves,” says Boss.
Safety you can hear
Honeywell has also developed the Quietpro solution, a two-way communication device which also protects wearers from the high decibel environments they may be working in.
Whether it is an onshore of offshore rig, one of the biggest challenges for operators is the noise, prolonged exposure to noisy environments can cause long term health effects.
Honeywell‘s product is designed to integrate with existing communication devices and eliminates the background noise so workers can communicate more effectively. “And there’s a big return on investment,” says Boss. “We keep these workers on that platform longer because they are protected from the noisy environments,” he adds.
