Hazardous Area Equipment Inspections: A HUVR Use Case

Summary

A global supermajor oil and gas company’s site was conducting their Hazardous Area Equipment (HAEQ) inspections, also known as Instrumentation & Electrical (I&E) inspections, and often referred to as EX equipment inspections, on paper. This led to inefficiencies due to long manual data translation processes from paper to spreadsheets. In 2023, the site partnered with HUVR to find a digital solution. Through this partnership, they were able to:

• Implement a new digital solution seamlessly within two months.
• Enhance regulatory compliance by visualizing compliance metrics, asset failures, and remaining annual inspections with HUVR’s configurable dashboards.
• Reduce their contracted inspection team from five to two contractors, reducing contractor costs by 60%.
• Standardize their inspection processes for consistent data capture across various third-party vendors and in-house inspectors.
• Capture data more effectively by expanding their inspection workflows from 10 to 36 various HAEQ/I&E digital inspection workflows, leveraging a mobile application with offline capabilities for efficient field data collection.
• Conduct 11,000+ inspections in four months, showing over a 140% increase in performance from previous inspection periods despite working with a smaller team.

Challenges

In 2023, the oil and gas company faced significant efficiency and data management challenges with their paper-based HAEQ/I&E inspection process. Thousands of historical inspections required manual transcription into spreadsheets, which was time-consuming and resulted in unstructured data. This unstructured data limited the potential for predictive insights and regulatory compliance.

Given the large volume of HAEQ/I&E inspections (1,000 inspections in five months in 2023), maintaining compliance with Australian Electrical Code’s AS/NZS 60079 Series was critical. The team recognized the urgent need for a new digital solution to avoid inefficient paper-based processes and errors.

Solution

The ideal digital solution needed to be:

• Easy to adopt and simple to use in the field. A core component of this was the mobile application with robust offline capabilities, enabling inspectors to seamlessly collect data even in remote locations without internet access, thereby accelerating the data collection process and significantly reducing manual data entry requirements.
• Interoperable with existing systems.
• Capable of ingesting and storing large volumes of inspection data.
• Cost-effective.

Considering these requirements, the organization selected HUVR due to its simplicity, world-class service, data handling capabilities, and cost-effectiveness.

The implementation was collaborative and smooth, leading to improvements in both existing processes and the HUVR system itself. HUVR’s service team worked with the company to build nearly 40,000 projects in the system across 28 asset types and 36 workflows in just two months.

HUVR’s digitization process identified and optimized more workflows. We greatly simplified these workflows, tailoring them specifically for each equipment type. This change tripled the number of digitized workflows and enhanced data capture for thousands of HAEQ/I&E inspections. We also set up automated inspection schedules to notify teams for annual inspections. All equipment required a thorough inspection every four years, aligning with federal standards. We also included a random selection process for thorough inspections of 0.5% of equipment, as per Australian regulations. We developed digital checklists to ensure uniform data capture, providing consistent and accurate field data. Additionally, we improved the process by capturing geospatial data, increasing data precision. We created configurable dashboards to visualize and track compliance, identify equipment failure locations for repair planning, and monitor the remaining inspection scope.

Additionally, HUVR’s Forms module allowed inspection teams to conduct inspections on equipment outside the original plan, with these inspections being automatically integrated into the annual maintenance schedule.

Training and field rollout were cohesive, with high adoption rates due to the system’s simplicity and biweekly hands-on training sessions over two months. This eliminated inefficient, error-prone manual data translation. The efficiencies gained also enabled the site to reduce their contracted inspectors from five to two, resulting in a 60% reduction in contracted inspector costs.

Results

The transition to HUVR for digitized inspection workflows and data management significantly revolutionized the HAEQ inspection process at the supermajor oil and gas site. This shift to an end-to-end digital system led to standardized, rich data capture and greater field efficiency. Key achievements included:

• Rapid and seamless implementation of a new digital inspection system in just two months.
• Reduced contracted inspection team from five to two inspectors, achieving a 60% reduction in contractor cost.
• Improved regulatory compliance through dashboards visualizing compliance measures, tracking asset failure locations, and ensuring adherence to inspection requirements.
• Scheduling automation that notifies inspectors for equipment inspections, enhancing compliance with Australian regulations and simplifying planning.
• Standardization of data capture, yielding consistently clean, reliable, and quality data from the field.
• Scaling over three times the number of digitized inspection workflows, increasing from 10 to 36.
• A 140% performance increase in inspections, completing 11,000 in two months with two inspectors compared to 9,000 in four months with the previous system.
• Automatic integration of new inspection types into annual maintenance schedules using HUVR’s Forms capability.
• A planned 38,000 inspections in 2024, significantly up from 10,000 in 2023.

Overall, digitizing with HUVR improved and simplified the organization’s HAEQ/I&E inspections.