Case Study: Alyeska Pipeline Service Company
Compliance Management: A Comprehensive Approach to Assuring Management Actions and Commitments (Continued)


Selecting a Solution
Jessee and his team knew Alyeska required an excellent system, and they developed a rigorous qualitative selection matrix to help them find it. The software selection matrix focused on important criteria that included:

• Risk based on vendor maturity/stability, product maturity/stability and other preliminary costs
• Process compatibility with defined business requirements
• User interface and intuitive nature of the product
• Data compatibility with data fields identified in MAC process
• Technical compatibility with Alyeska’s IT infrastructure and strategy
  

“We first looked at developing a custom solution from scratch,” Jessee recalls. But after a look at the high costs, long timeline and other risk issues, Jessee and his team decided instead to search for existing Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) systems. They found 13 off-the-shelf offerings that generally matched Alyeska’s requirements.

Digging deeper, they knocked ten off the list and focused on the three most likely to be able to meet or exceed TAPS’ demanding requirements. After reviewing the presentations of the three vendors, Jessee and his team asked the top two to provide formal vendor proposals.

“In the course of managing the pipeline, Alyeska is required to adhere to many regulations imposed by state and federal government agencies. We anticipate that CATSWeb will help us to assure that any notable conditions that are discovered are consistently acted upon in a timely manner and tracked to closure.” Dan Hisey Chief Operating Officer Alyeska Pipeline Service Company

AssurX’s team worked part-time over a two-week period using a hosted Internet connection to deliver a working prototype within Alyeska’s deadline. “It was simple to tailor the flow and feel of CATSWeb to meet our requirements,” Jessee said.

Implementing the Solution
With CATSWeb identified as their choice, the Alyeska team – backed by AssurX support – put together a project team with key personnel from all supporting vendors.

“We went through a formal functional design phase and detailed every aspect,” Jessee says. “Before we built anything, its functional design had to be fully understood.” Doing it this way also made certain that all parties approved design details before implementation.

“Our implementation process worked out pretty well,” Jessee recalls. Development was done on a hosted server at SysGen in Illinois and another was set up at Alyeska for quality control. Handling testing this way saved a lot of time, Jessee says.

“Because of AssurX’s ability to immediately provide a hosted site for development, we didn’t have to wait until all the hardware was installed before we could get moving…we could do things in parallel.”

Elaborating on the process, he explains, “We were able to keep moving forward even when we didn’t have the final hardware on-site yet…we migrated information in batch mode, completed certain forms, and then tested them. Once everything worked as designed, then we’d deploy, migrate and install.”

Training & Going Live
CATSWeb went live in October 2003 within the approved budget and to unanimous user approval, Jessee says – a trend that continues to the present, as he says, “User feedback has been very positive.”

But if the deployment phase went smoothly, the training path was even smoother. In fact, an Alyeska employee designed the training system for other employees. “We took the training process and made it into an interactive tool with audio that explains how the process works and what the different roles are,” Jessee says. It takes only about 30 minutes to go through the training.

New Process Impact
Asked to describe ways the new process has impacted operations at Alyeska, Jessee notes for starters that management no longer needs to meet each month to go over delinquencies; instead, the system provides an automatic online report published on the first of each month. “Management is happy; they now have their monthly reports from the home page and enjoy major efficiencies.”

Another positive impact: those old 5% to 20% delinquency rates are a thing of the past. Since implementation, there has been a grand total of one delinquency over the past 21 months. Alyeska personnel are now able to “hit the deadlines, monitor assignments and better communicate” observes Jessee. Better still, Alyeska has “raised the bar” for its own performance standards.

“Performance metrics have been raised to 99% of all MAC actions and commitments in a timely manner, an order of magnitude improvement,” Jessee says. In addition, over 100 changes have been implemented to date as part of the ongoing continuous improvement program at Alyeska.

A Bright Future
“We’re finding new ways to use the tool all the time to manage compliance activities,” Jessee says. For starters, he’s already adding more management processes including document change, reliability centered maintenance, change management and lessons learned.

Alyeska officials are working with regulators to identify ongoing regulatory obligations that are due on a quarterly or yearly basis. “By doing this, MAC has been able to assign these recurring actions and assure ongoing compliance by documenting the history,” Jessee says. “Thanks to our new program, we’ll now have a complete history of how we’ve complied.”

Like many new uses the team at Alyeska continues to discover, the ongoing regulatory obligations weren’t part of the original project. “The new system has grown with us to help in ways we hadn’t even imagined,” he says.