PETROTECHNICS says it is the only provider of a fully Integrated Safe System of Work (ISSOW) solution for the oil&gas industry.
The firm’s web-based solution, Sentinel PRO, commands a North Sea market share of more than 85% and the system is said to be transforming control of work across 17 countries, spanning five continents.
Not bad for a former BP staffer who, 10 years into what was, by any standard, a comfortable, well-paid career, got out in 1989 to create Petrotechnics.
The firm’s core function is as a global implementation partner “working strategically to implement best practice in the oil&gas industry”.
Its system enables operators to manage frontline work activity by integrating risk assessment, isolations controls and permits to work. Basically, it’s about safety.
Phil Murray and his team have created a standard bearer, not a follower. Having cornered the North Sea, they are bent on pioneering a global industry standard, integrating all aspects of frontline work activity.
Sentinel PRO is fully scalable, and Petrotechnics has global agreements with majors such as Shell, BP and Exxon, yet also serves single-asset operators, plus you can find it onshore.
Twenty-one years on from setting up shop, Murray is at the helm of a business turning over roughly £15million a year and which is becoming increasingly international in scope. Its reputation means it gets called in to handle some very high-profile cases, of which Texas City is a prime example.
“We were asked very early on after the Texas City Refinery disaster to go in and help BP understand its safe systems at work challenges there,” Murray told Energy.
“A direct result is that our system is now being implemented right across this refinery.”
Murray is an out-of-the-box thinker, maybe not as confident as he appears, and is hungry to learn from others, perhaps none more so than the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, in California, courtesy of Scottish Enterprise/Scottish Development International.
Described as a learning journey, Murray and others perceived as examples of smart entrepreneurs in Scotland were given the opportunity to discover first-hand whatever it was that made Silicon Valley so iconic.
“What characterised the whole learning journey was that everyone was modest, yet open and sharing of their knowledge,” said Murray.
“Gerry Ingles, a professor at University of California – Berkeley said they were that way because the currency in Silicon Valley is knowledge and everyone will freely share it.
“This is not completely altruistic. The reason they share it is that if they see an opportunity they will freely give their knowledge just to be part of helping that opportunity. That was universal among the people we met.
“One guy, Gordon Ewbanks – retired CEO of Symantec – said to us, ‘You’ve done what many people in Silicon Valley in fact haven’t. You hear the global success stories, but there are a lot of companies with a lot of promise who don’t make it, don’t get to your stage’.
“He said we should celebrate that, but also said, ‘You’re not big enough. You’re in a great position, now go to the next stage’. And there was lots of really practical advice on how to build a global technology company.”
That’s kind of the situation Murray finds himself in today with Petrotechnics – how best to make the big leap. Bear in mind, it has taken more than 20 years to get to £15million turnover.
Murray’s ambition is not helped by recent events – the credit crunch and wild oil-price wobble. So it looks like the leap across the chasm advocated by the likes of Ewbanks isn’t going to happen this year. And yet it might – it really could.
“We think 2010 will be a more challenging economic environment than this year.
“However, with the stage that we’re at (in company development terms) growth could become binary, as one of the majors is talking about rolling out our system globally.
“This could have a huge impact on our performance.
“The other interesting thing that’s happening with our technology is that, although it is primarily seen as a safety system, increasingly, we now have data built up over the past nine years of how people operate … how work gets executed.
“In the North Sea, we have 20,000 registered users. It’s the most widely used system. People have to log on before we go to work. So we have data that we haven’t used that tells us about the efficiency or, perhaps more correctly, inefficiency of how work is executed offshore.”
Murray said that a characteristic of the North Sea is that companies are striving to get better, but because its not a manufacturing business, the sector tries to do things top-down.
“But we’ve got data that’s bottom-up, what actually happens, and that’s very powerful.
“Ours is the first bit of technology that’s really been deployed in frontline work execution and we can leverage that in three ways.
“One is the data. The second is what I call the delivery channel. People are routinely logging on to our system … every day. Those 20,000 North Sea users have performed five million jobs over the past nine years.
“So what can we send down that line – safety bulletins, chemical data sheets? A lot else? It’s an eyeball of a kind that the industry has never had before.
“The third aspect is transparency. We can sit in this office here … all you need is a web browser and the right security privilege … and we can look at any operation with our systems in the world – who’s performing the job; how they assess the risks; who authorised the job; how they describe the job. Anywhere in the world … Sakhalin Island even.”
Does Murray have the mettle to make this happen?
“It’s about disruptive technologies and making them mainstream. We took something that was radical nine years ago and it is now mainstream. We can do it again.
“One of the phrases that I use to guide the company is, ‘from geek to granny’. What I mean by that is that, at the start of internet, you literally had to be a nuclear scientist to use it. Now, grannies not only use it, they do way, way more than the nuclear scientists did, and at the click of a button. All technology goes that way … doing a lot more, more simply.
“Our beliefs and values have got us this far. They will take us into the future.”