Microsoft Office SystemCustomer Solution Case Study

Service Provider in Oil and Gas Improves HSE Management with

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Energy—Oil and gas

Customer ProfileBased 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 SituationHercules 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.

SolutionHercules 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

“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

SituationBased in Houston, Texas, Hercules Offshore has a mission to provide injury-free, environmentally sound, reliable, and cost-effective 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 MergersOne 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.

“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

Poor Visibility into DataAt 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.

“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.”

SolutionAfter 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.

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

“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 e-mail 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.”

BenefitsSince 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 PoliciesThe 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 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 BehaviorMore 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 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.”

Standardizing Processes to Save MoneyInstead 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

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-

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.”

Microsoft Office SystemThe Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to: www.microsoft.com/office

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

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

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2008

Software and Services Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003

− Microsoft Office Excel 2003− Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003− Microsoft Office Outlook 2003− Microsoft Office SharePoint

Server 2007 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

− Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Visual Studio

− Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Technologies

− Microsoft .NET Framework− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

Notification Services

Partner Applied Information Sciences