Microsoft Office System
Customer Solution Case Study
Service Provider in Oil and Gas Improves HSE
Management with Dashboard Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Energy—Oil and gas
Customer Profile
Based in Houston, Texas, Hercules
Offshore is a leading provider of offshore
contract drilling, liftboat, and inland barge
services, with operations on five
continents. It employs 3,500 people.
Business Situation
Hercules Offshore recently acquired
another company. While consolidating
Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE)
departments, it began looking for an
automated solution to help employees
engage more in HSE practices.
Solution
Hercules Offshore deployed an Office
Business Application called HSE
Dashboard, a solution that was built using
Microsoft® collaboration and database
technologies it already owned.
Benefits
 Increased employee engagement with
HSE policies
 Helped employees practice safe
behavior
 Standardized processes to reduce
administrative costs
 Improved visibility into HSE data
“Microsoft technologies support our philosophy of
engaging all employees in health and safety practices.
Today, more employees are practicing safer behavior,
reducing the potential for serious accidents.”
Rick McClaine, Vice President for Health, Safety, and Environment, Hercules Offshore
Hercules Offshore is a global provider of offshore contract drilling,
liftboat, and inland barge services based in Houston, Texas. After a
series of acquisitions and mergers, Hercules Offshore needed to
standardize and automate its various health, safety, and
environment (HSE) processes. Instead of buying an off-the-shelf
software solution, the company decided to build a Web-based
dashboard, using Microsoft® collaboration and database
technologies that it already licensed. HSE Dashboard is an Office
Business Application that allows employees to effectively
collaborate using Microsoft Office system products, promoting the
ubiquitous adoption and widespread commitment to HSE that
Hercules Offshore wanted. Employees are using the solution’s
standardized workflows and detailed reporting to reduce
administrative expenses and to make better HSE policy decisions.
Situation
“We work in some of the
harshest environments
on the planet…I can
think of no other
industry where getting
safety right is as
important.”
Rick McClaine, Vice President for Health,
Safety, and Environment, Hercules Offshore
Based in Houston, Texas, Hercules Offshore
has a mission to provide injury-free,
environmentally sound, reliable, and costeffective services to the oil and gas industry.
Since starting operations in 2005 as a 5-rig,
U.S.$100 million company, Hercules Offshore
has grown to 66 rigs and 65 liftboats, and is
now a company worth an estimated $2
billion. Today, the company has 11 offices
around the world. Customers, including
international and national oil companies, and
integrated exploration and production
companies, rely on the service provider’s
reputation for workers skilled in the demands
and challenges of the offshore environment.
For Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE)
Vice President Rick McClaine, those demands
and challenges provide the rationale for
building and maintaining a strong HSE culture
throughout the Hercules Offshore
organization. “We work in some of the
harshest environments on the planet,”
McClaine says. “Our vessels operate 365
days a year, 24 hours a day, drilling holes in
the earth with lots of pressure and machinery
moving around. I can think of no other
industry, where getting safety right is as
important.”
Incompatible Processes after Mergers
One of the reasons for Hercules Offshore’s
growth is a series of acquisitions and
mergers, the last of which saw the company
purchasing Todco in July 2007. This posed a
problem for McClaine, because every
company acquired brought with it a different
way of managing HSE, and trying to
amalgamate those processes was confusing
for employees used to doing things a certain
way. In addition, it was a challenge to ensure
that health and safety practices complied
with the many governing bodies in the oil and
gas industry in all the countries where
Hercules Offshore maintains a presence.
“We had people using different forms and
spreadsheets to collect and report
information in different ways all over the
world,” says McClaine. “The Todco merger
compelled us to take action to standardize
and simplify our HSE policies and procedures.
This was an opportunity to evaluate what we
had been doing and get it right.”
Central to McClaine’s vision was the idea of
engaging everyone at Hercules Offshore in a
pervasive HSE culture. Up until this time, HSE
policies and procedures existed in dusty
manuals, and employees who had occasion
to report an incident followed unstructured
workflows. They filled out paper forms or sent
electronic documents around the company as
e-mail attachments that ended up in inboxes
where they might or might not be read. “We
needed to help our employees see the value
of our HSE program, in contrast to them
thinking it’s just a piece of paper that they
have to fill out for auditors or safety
inspectors,” says McClaine.
Poor Visibility into Data
At the same time, Hercules Offshore
management wanted to improve visibility into
HSE data. People had been using Microsoft®
Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software to
handle reporting and perform some
manipulation of HSE data, but it was difficult
for managers to perform historical trending,
analysis of leading and lagging indicators,
and post-incident reviews. The company had
a few key performance indicators, such as
lost-time incident rates, that extended back
for five years; however, if managers wanted
to drill down and ask what other indicators
may have played a role in the incidents, the
task would require a manual, day-long
process.
Even in the realm of business intelligence,
McClaine emphasizes the importance of
employee engagement in HSE: “It is only
when you enable all employees to engage in
the HSE process in a way that’s simple, clear,
and intuitive that you will begin to collect
information that reflects what’s really going
on in the workplace.”
With the Todco acquisition pending, Hercules
Offshore management needed to find the
right technology solution to achieve its goal of
a pervasive HSE culture with 100 percent
employee engagement. “We didn’t want a
health and safety department of a few dozen
people responsible for the safety of 3,500
people,” says McClaine. “In a sense, we
wanted 3,500 people to be members of the
health and safety department.
Figure 1 - Hercules Offshore
developed an Office Business
Application called HSE Dashboard
using Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server 2007 to automate health,
safety, and environment practices
throughout the organization.
“We knew technology would help us move
from manual unstructured workflow to
automated structured processes that would
compel people to participate in HSE. For this
to work, the technology had to be user
friendly and intuitive so people would adopt
the solution. It also had to be flexible, so we
could map it to our HSE policies and
procedures.”
Solution
After evaluating several off-the-shelf solutions
for automating HSE processes, Hercules
Offshore turned to its IT partner Applied
Information Sciences (AIS) to build an Office
Business Application (OBA), a solution that
unlocks the information in line-of-business
systems by using familiar Microsoft Office
programs, servers, and services.
“We went through an exhaustive hunt to find
a solution that would work,” recalls McClaine.
“Off-the-shelf products were too complicated,
costly, and inflexible. Most of the IT
professionals who I talked to didn’t
understand the unique needs of an HSE
application. AIS proved to be the exception.
Instead of getting an unsuitable product, we
agreed with our partner’s suggestion to use
Microsoft technologies that we already
licensed, which AIS could tailor to fit our
needs. It sounded perfect.”
In September 2007, shortly after the Todco
acquisition was completed, Microsoft Gold
Certified Partner AIS sat down with
representatives from Hercules Offshore to
gather requirements and define new health,
safety, and environment-related processes.
Between the end of September and the
second week of January 2008, the two
companies worked through many iterations of
a dashboard solution, with AIS consultants
developing forms and reports and making
them available on a prototype server for
weekly feedback sessions. The project
yielded five main forms with workflows, some
of which were branched and involved
delegation; 20 administrative screens; and
more than 52 Microsoft SQL Server® 2005
Reporting Services reports.
Called HSE Dashboard, the OBA applies
standardized workflows to automate incident
response, reporting, and managerial tasks. It
uses Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 forms
for employees to enter HSE data, and Office
Excel 2003 to enable employees to build
PivotTable® and PivotChart® dynamic views
for data analysis. The solution also takes
advantage of Microsoft Office SharePoint®
Server 2007 to provide a Web browser–
based collaboration and structured workflow
environment available to all employees.
The solution was built using the Microsoft
Visual Studio® 2008 development system
and .NET Framework version 2.0, and takes
advantage of a SQL Server® 2005 database
to store HSE information. Data submitted by
employees using Office InfoPath 2003 forms
within Office SharePoint Server 2007
workflows is extracted in near real time and
loaded into the database that generates the
SQL Server Reporting Services reports. (See
Figure 1.)
AIS used Windows® Workflow Foundation—
the .NET Framework programming model,
engine, and tools for quickly building
workflow-enabled applications—to create HSE
workflows to fit Hercules Offshore
specifications. (See Figure 2.) Microsoft
Exchange Server 2007 and the Microsoft
Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and
collaboration client combine to provide the
messaging system required for workflow email alerts, escalation reminders, and
calendar availability.
“HSE Dashboard, built with Microsoft
technologies, challenges the ‘buy versus
build’ paradigm,” says Gary McDonald,
Practice Manager at AIS. “We built and
delivered the solution in five months, about
the same amount of time that it takes to
deploy a lot of the shrink-wrapped packages
in the oil and gas sector. We achieved this
quick time-to-market by taking advantage of
the out-of-the-box capabilities of Office
SharePoint Server 2007, such as integrated
workflows, dashboards, and report center.
And using SQL Server Reporting Services, we
were able to develop one complex report a
day.”
Adds McClaine, “The combination of flexible,
user-friendly Microsoft technologies and a
knowledgeable partner like AIS is hard to
beat. We achieved all our goals for the HSE
project without a lot of time-consuming
training. Office SharePoint Server 2007 was
the perfect easy-to-use tool to encourage
immediate user adoption. Today, everything
we do in the HSE arena— from a reactive
post-incident standpoint to collecting
information for devising policies that help
prevent incidents—is administered through
HSE Dashboard.”
Benefits
Since deploying HSE Dashboard, Hercules
Offshore has achieved McClaine’s vision of a
solution that increases employee
engagement with health, safety, and
environment policies, thus helping employees
practice safer behavior in the workplace. In
addition, the company is saving
administrative time and money by using
standardized, simplified HSE processes. And
with greater visibility into HSE data,
management can continuously work on
improving policies and procedures.
“Microsoft technologies support our
philosophy of engaging all employees in
health and safety practices,” says McClaine.
“As a result, more employees are practicing
safer behavior, reducing the potential of
serious accidents.”
Increasing Employee Engagement with
HSE Policies
The easy-to-use collaborative solution helped
McClaine achieve his goal of engaging the
entire work force in HSE policies and
practices. Standardized, automated
workflows make it easier for employees to
follow prescribed processes, encouraging
HSE Dashboard – Automated Workflow
database for analysis and, if necessary, new
policies will be developed to address them.
“This is the key to health and safety: Engaged
employees who feel empowered to control
their own health and safety in the workplace
will result in fewer incidents.”
Paper / Word Forms
Figure 2 - The HSE Dashboard
OBA uses Microsoft Office
InfoPath 2003 forms to replicate
paper forms and Microsoft Office
Word documents. Employees
enter data into the forms as part
of workflows that encourage
engagement with health, safety,
and environment-related practices
across the enterprise.
Automated Workflow
their understanding and participation in a
global HSE culture.
“Our HSE Dashboard drives organizational
behavior in a way that the old policy and
procedure manual could never do,” adds
McClaine. “And because Microsoft
technologies are easy to use, employees
quickly adopted the new solution into their
everyday work.”
Helping Employees Practice Safer
Behavior
More importantly, HSE Dashboard helps
employees engage in safer behavior and
prevent accidents. “For every single fatality, it
has been calculated that there are 30,000
unsafe human behaviors that do not result in
incident. I call this phenomenon ‘people
practicing to have an accident,’” says
McClaine. “A large majority of the data that
we are collecting in HSE Dashboard comes
from employees’ discussions with each other
and their managers about potentially risky
behavior. These behaviors are entered in the
Standardizing Processes to Save Money
Instead of trying to cobble together disparate
forms and reporting practices from around
the world, Hercules Offshore now has all
employees filling out the same forms and
using the same workflow, and managers have
a “one-stop shop” for all HSE data. “Now that
HSE practices are standardized, it’s easier to
demonstrate regulatory compliance,” notes
McClaine. “Automated processes reduce the
time required to administer and manage HSE
policies for our entire department, so we’re
saving money and working more effectively.”
Hercules Offshore employees also use the
HSE Dashboard to more quickly process its
claims systems reporting and assignments
for insurance purposes, effectively uniting
HSE and risk mitigation processes in one
solution.
Improving Visibility into Data
Many of HSE Dashboard’s 52 reports are
generated from data collected through the
standardized workflows and provide
managers with online access to reliable
information that’s not dependent on what
employees think their managers want to see.
“When you get good reporting through
simplified processes that engage the
employees, you start to see clearly what is
happening in the workplace,” says McClaine.
“We can see what’s happening by crew, by
rig, by geographical region, or however we
want to analyze the data. Understanding at
this level is necessary before you can
exercise appropriate leadership, drive
accountability, and improve HSE policies.”
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For more information about the Microsoft
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For more information about Applied
Information Sciences products and
services, call (713) 574-1601 or visit the
Web site at:
www.appliedis.com
For more information about Hercules
Offshore products and services, call (800)
880-9166 or visit the Web site at:
www.herculesoffshore.com
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Microsoft Office
− Microsoft Office Professional Edition
2003
− Microsoft Office Excel 2003
− Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003
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− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007
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− Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published September 2008
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
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