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What Are The Benefits Of Applying HFE In The Oil & Gas Industry?

There are several efforts to mitigate serious failings in the safety management system. While there are stark improvements, incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon had shown us that more work has to be done.[1]

The discipline of Human Factors Engineering (HFE) entails the application of HF’s essence to the design and operation of socio-technical systems.

“The objective of HFE is to ensure systems are designed in a way that optimizes the human contribution to production and minimizes potential for design-induced risks to health, personnel or process safety or environmental performance.” – Association of Oil and Gas Producers

In order to meet regulatory requirements, there is an increasing need to include HFE into the equation. For instance, in UK North Sea, HSE’s Assessment Principles for Offshore Safety Cases make specific reference to the need to take account of HF to manage major accident hazards. In Norway, the NORSOK standards developed by the Norwegian petroleum industry includes detailed requirements for HFE.

HFE is important for minimizing occupational safety risks and ensuring the health and well-being of the people working in the oil and gas industry, reducing downtime. The effective application of HFE principles can also improve operational efficiency and maintainability through streamlining tasks, optimizing workloads and ergonomic design. Rather than incurring huge cost from short interruptions to operations, organisations should put more thought into the workings of applying HFE into their operations.

Implementation of a successful HFE program addresses both the well-being of humans and optimal system performance. It focused on efficiency, reliability, availability and maintainability. An effective HFE analysis look at key issues, primarily manning issues such as job definition, specification of the roles undertaken by different personnel and how they are related to one another in the whole course of operation.

Human Factors Engineering for Oil & Gas is a 3-day course that is based on the well-established discipline of HFE. Participants will also be introduced to the contemporary thinking related to Applied Human Factors and Safety in Design. Through this course, participants will learn and improve the way design decisions are made, and to recognise which human issues are critical. This workshop is designed to be accessible to students without the scientific background in this field as well. For more information, please visit us at http://www.opuskinetic.com/training or contact us at info@opuskinetic.com.

Opus Kinetic believes that people are why organisations are successful, and giving people the knowledge to perform well at their job is integral for success. We pride ourselves as the premier provider of knowledge, offering acclaimed in-house training, leadership training courses, oil and gas training courses, courses that target health safety and environment, etc. Our training courses are well researched and updated with the latest industry trends. For more information on our professional training programs, you can visit us at http://www.opuskinetic.com/training.

 

[1] NOSORK standards originally stands for “the Norwegian shelf’s competitive position”, and was introduced in 1994. It is developed by the Norwegian petroleum industry to ensure adequate safety, value adding and cost effectiveness for petroleum industry developments and operations.

Jayden

I am JC and I am an editor.