Operational awareness is a fundamental pillar of the oil and gas industry, ensuring organisational leaders have maximum visibility over the business. However, as the industry undergoes strategic shifts to meet growth targets, maintaining a comprehensive overview can be challenging.
The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) recently unveiled a five-year plan to facilitate industry growth, highlighting skills shortages and an increasingly complex operational environment as key challenges in achieving targets. The global project boom needs more workers, new facilities and a pivot in operational strategy to adapt to the evolving risks and threats in the energy sector.
Given the significant shift over the next few years, building and maintaining operational awareness will be crucial to the plan's success. Technology that enables proactive oversight of facilities can be an integral part of achieving milestones and long-term objectives.
The importance of operational awareness in oil and gas
Operational awareness is an organisation's capability to understand what's happening in the business in real time. In the energy sector, that means keeping an eye on the entire operational spectrum, with accurate, up-to-date performance metrics from facility safety to production efficiency.
Where oil and gas operations are particularly complex, maintaining awareness becomes a priority for industry leaders, needing more informed decision-making through data-driven reporting. Given that facilities are often distributed globally, access to the complete operational picture is an important factor in driving organisational success.
High operational awareness helps leaders address recurring challenges, such as ever-changing regulatory frameworks, sustainability goals and the mitigation of accidents and injuries. However, as the oil and gas industry faces increased operational hurdles, effective oversight of facilities has become more complex.
Challenge of effective oversight
As the ECITB presents its five-year plan to achieve growth across multiple manual sectors, it outlines several issues that could hinder an oil and gas entity's ability to maintain resilient oversight of operations. In energy, the primary concerns are training a new workforce to meet production demand, addressing safety and compliance and mitigating external risks and threats across a complex operational environment.
Introducing new employees to oil and gas facilities means providing rigorous training to ensure they follow safety protocols and minimise the risk of accidents and injuries. Any incident could significantly disrupt operations during periods of increased demand, as demonstrated by a recent accident at an Equinor refinery.
Regulatory compliance across different jurisdictions is subject to rapid change, exposing organisations with distributed facilities to operational hurdles. As incidents occur, authorities can change frameworks, leaving organisations with the burden of quickly revamping their operations to meet requirements, which can be costly and disruptive.
External risks, such as theft, damage and vandalism of facilities by malicious actors, can also hinder operational integrity. Mitigating such instances is an increasingly important part of awareness, as threats are growing in number and attacks are becoming more sophisticated.
Scalable awareness solutions
The leading challenges highlight the difficulty of maintaining operational awareness across distributed oil and gas facilities. The increasing numbers, action speeds and evolving external security landscape are core factors that hinder an organisation's ability to provide leaders with effective oversight.
More organisations are shifting towards technologies that enable a proactive, scalable approach to operational awareness. Solutions such as advanced video management software can help address core challenges by extending visibility across facilities and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to provide deeper insight into the entire operational spectrum.
Such solutions can support operational awareness by providing a data-driven platform that scales with the organisation's needs, especially across distributed facilities in the oil and gas industry. The visual data processed across all locations can enable more informed decision-making and faster, impactful action, such as understanding site worker efficiency, ensuring compliance and identifying facility security gaps.
Maintaining operational awareness
Where operational datasets will expand in parallel with the ECTIB's growth ambitions, such technologies can become integral to maintaining operational awareness. The increasingly transient nature of the oil and gas industry requires powerful tools to manage operational evolution at effective speeds.
Industry analysts see no signs of slowing demand, meaning organisations must proactively build a more resilient operation to hit growth targets consistently. Managing increasing volumes of visual data can support the decision-making standards required to maintain awareness and sustain success across all areas of the business.