CASE STUDY
MetricStream
Customer
ONE OF THE FOREMOST PRODUCERS OF OIL & GAS
IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Benefits
Enhanced collaboration and integration: Using
MetricStream Solution, the company can streamline
and integrate audits across the enterprise, thus
breaking down restrictive organizational silos and
improving collaboration across business depart-
ments, operations and locations. Each of these units
can perform audits independently but collaborate
to ensure that their efforts are not duplicated in
other units. This way, costs are saved, operational
efficiencies are gained and the accuracy of auditing
is improved.
Better visibility for decision-making: With Met-
ricStream’s powerful dashboards, the company can
evaluate the status of audit and CAPA management
at any time. Hard facts and metrics delivered by the
system enable managers to track and resolve issues
efficiently, ensure on-going compliance and make
informed business decisions impacting profitability.
Simplified process management: With Metric-
Stream’s user-friendly features, the company can
easily and confidently comply with regulatory
demands. Automated capabilities reduce the time
and effort required for audit and CAPA management,
enabling auditors to focus on more value-oriented
functions such as analyzing audit trends and advising
the company Board.
Increased cost efficiencies: MetricStream’s
automated workflows, control testing and issue
remediation enable the company to reduce the
manpower and resources required for auditing and
CAPA management. It also enables them to transform
audit management into a competitive advantage, thus
attracting more customers.
A LEADING OIL & GAS COMPANY STRENGTHENS AND
STREAMLINES QUALITY MANAGEMENT PROCESSES
MetricStream’s Integrated GRC platform, comprising Audit, Incident and CAPA Management solutions,
enhances collaboration and visibility, simplifies process management and increases cost efficiency
Customer
The company, a fully integrated and government-owned entity, is focused on oil and gas explora-
tion, as well as drilling, refining and distribution of petroleum products and natural gas. Its customers
stretch across the Middle East, India, the Far East, South East Asia and Africa.
Overview
The company is deeply committed to protecting the environment, ensuring the health and safety of its
people and complying with global standards and guidelines. In line with these goals, it has established
a rigorous program for safety, quality and compliance management. It has also created an Environ-
ment, Health and Safety (EHS) policy that integrates occupational health and safety management with
environment protection.
Significant resources are devoted towards training, building awareness and encouraging employees
to fulfill their compliance responsibilities. In addition, thorough audits are conducted to ensure that
all external and internal policies are adhered to, that quality standards such as ISO 9001 are met, and
that noncompliance and enterprise risks are mitigated.
As the company’s business operations expanded and became more complex, auditing processes
demanded much more time, effort and investment. In the face of these developments, the company
was keenly focused on enhancing the efficiency of audits, while improving their cost-effectiveness
and ensuring compliance with all regulations and requirements.
Challenges
Absence of a unified process for Issue Management
The company did not have a unified, enterprise-level issue tracking and monitoring system. Conse-
quently, it became difficult to capture critical incidents such as fire hazards and oil spills which could
impact the safety of workers and the profitability of the company.
Limited collaboration
With over 600 audits needing to be completed every year, the company’s resources were strained.
Adding to the complexity, each department – such as Operations, Environment, Health, Fire and
Safety, and Quality – conducted their audits without much interaction or collaboration with others
departments. This isolated approach of auditing often led to redundant and duplicate audits, which in
turn, consumed more resources, time and effort than was actually required.
Lack of automation
The company had to audit approximately 18 areas and check for multiple compliance regulations rang-
ing from ISO 9001 to ISO 27001 to OHSAS 18001. Most of these audits were conducted using manual
paper-based processes. As a result, tremendous time and resources were spent on collecting the
required information, analyzing the information and delivering the required insights.
Limited visibility
Given the large scale of the company’s operations, it was imperative that managers gained timely
visibility into audit trends to make crucial business decisions. However, their existing systems did not
provide them with a centralized and real-time view of audit processes and results. Instead, managers
had to wait for the reports to be compiled manually.
Solution
To overcome the above challenges, the company decided to implement an automated, integrated and
web-based system for Audit Management, Incident Management and Corrective Action / Preventive
Action (CAPA) Management.
MetricStream
Why MetricStream
MetricStream provides a single platform approach
to streamline and integrate compliance management
across the enterprise
MetricStream supports the independent management
of downstream assignments with the capability to roll
information back upstream for centralized reporting
MetricStream comes equipped with strong reporting
capabilities such as executive dashboards, risk heat
maps and color coding charts which provide central-
ized and real-time visibility into enterprise-wide risk
and compliance data
MetricStream Solutions are easy-to-use, quick to
implement and can be scaled up or down as per the
company’s requirements
MetricStream contains comprehensive, automated
workflow capabilities to efficiently manage the audit
universe and audit lifecycles from start to finish
For more information, visit
www.metricstream.com
Copyright 2011. All Rights Reserved.
After considering several solution providers, the company chose MetricStream because it offered
them a single platform approach to streamline audit and CAPA management across the enterprise. It
also offered them the benefits of scalability, flexibility and automation. Moreover, the MetricStream
platform was built as a modular system. Therefore, if the company wanted to implement more GRC
modules such as Compliance Management and Risk Management, the system was equipped to scale
up to these demands.
Once chosen, MetricStream thoroughly studied the company’s requirements, conducted a gap
analysis and then implemented its Audit Management, Incident Management and CAPA Management
Solutions.
MetricStream Audit Management Solution comes equipped with a range of powerful and innovative
features including best practices, risk and control assessments, automated alerts and work-flow
based remediation processes. Using the solution, the company can manage all audit-related activities
from a common platform. It can also streamline across the enterprise, its entire audit lifecycle - audit
scheduling, development of audit checklists, implementation of audits – both online and offline, gen-
eration of audit reports, and review and implementation of audit recommendations.
The solution enables the company’s auditors to define each audit in a logical structure and hierarchy.
For instance, audits related to quality standard ISO 14001 can be defined along with detailed tem-
plates, work orders, risk and control assessments, pass/fail criteria, checklists and audit tasks. Each
audit can be scheduled periodically or triggered on an ad-hoc basis depending on the requirements of
the company.
“We chose MetricStream primarily because of its track record in audit and compliance
management. Having worked with leading global oil and gas companies, MetricStream is
well-known for its feature-rich, user-friendly and flexible solutions. The company under-
stood our requirements and mapped them to their solution to deliver an audit manage-
ment system that was easy to roll out and has been quickly adopted in our organization.”
- Head of IT at the company
Whenever the audit is scheduled, automatic notifications are sent to the auditor as well as the
entity that is being audited. During the audit, the solution enables auditors to record qualitative and
quantitative findings, both onsite and offsite. It also provides predefined formats for entering detailed
observations and recommendations. Errors and inconsistencies are eliminated through the solution’s
systematic, work-flow driven process.
Once findings are generated, the system routes the audit findings and recommendations for review.
If issues are identified, they are immediately routed to the MetricStream Issue Management module.
The module interfaces with company departments and systems to capture the required information
on the incident, including the type of incident and source. A root-cause analysis is then conducted to
identify the source of the problem, categorize it and assign it to the appropriate personnel for inves-
tigation. Following this, the CAPA module initiates a remediation or corrective action process. The
entire process is kept on track with automatic alerts sent out in cases of delay.
Advanced reporting capabilities generate mandatory reports in pre-defined formats and layouts. This
helps the company simplify the reporting procedure and improve efficiency. Powerful role-based
dashboards provide real-time visibility into the auditing and CAPA processes, and enable the company
to measure the progress of these processes against key milestones.
Each dashboard comes with drill-down capabilities that provide statistics by a variety of parameters
such as audited entities, audit schedule, reports, type of report, and type of CAPA action triggered.
Using these dashboards, the company’s auditors can gain a transparent view of audits, risk and com-
pliance across the enterprise at any given time. It helps them track leading and lagging performance
indicators and send out notifications or apply remediation actions if operations vary from expected
performance levels.