Weston - Application Suite

Accelerating the process for managing oil and gas regulatory compliance

Regulatory compliance is the backbone of any permit to operate in the oil and gas industry.

But these requirements, together with a host of other sector rules and guidance, can be complex and change all the time, so it’s important businesses not only understand their obligations, but that they manage them and can demonstrate compliance.

And that’s where Aberdeen-based Weston comes in.

Background

The company brings together a huge volume of regulations and guidance, including acts, statutory instruments, Health and Safety Executive guidance and maritime rules in one place. This means operators and service companies can quickly and easily plan, manage and record their legislative responsibilities.

A subscription to the site gives users access to the full Weston database of legislation and guidance, which is maintained and updated on a daily basis. Users are alerted to new documents and any changes as soon as they are published.

Some 20 oil companies and 50 service companies subscribe, with more than 1,000 personnel regularly using this online service.

That said, it was important the web application evolved and performed as well as it could; however, the system had been running slowly - some pages were taking more than 15 seconds to load - and the time was right to see what else it could do.

Codify was approached at the end of 2017 and asked to take a look.

Approach

Before we even started work, we reviewed the source code and carried out a technical audit so we could get a clear idea of what approach was needed.

We visited the existing supplier in January 2018; the transition audit began a month later, and we provided client support throughout.

Weston took on board our recommendations, and we set to work on making improvements, both in the system itself and its functionality.

• System improvements included performance improvements, making the user log-in experience better and general maintenance and modernisation. These not only make using the system a better experience, but it’s easier for us to support too.
• New functionality included providing evidence of compliance by being able to upload documents and create asset templates. These allow users to set up a template for a project with all the documents and paperwork that might be needed. Users then copy this into the new project and adjust as needed. Previously, this all had to be done from scratch with teams spending around three weeks setting things up.

Weston director Daniel Strachan said:

“We needed a local company with a solid core of experienced and talented software engineers when our existing support was unable to meet our growing needs.

“We picked Codify after seeing several companies as they ticked all the boxes. They quickly came to grips with our existing systems and improved system performance immediately - the increase in page load speed is astonishing. Their structured approach and input to system enhancements has also made life much easier for us.”

One of the next steps will be moving hosting to Microsoft’s Azure platform, bringing benefits such as scalability: the ability for the system to easily adapt to manage increased (or decreased) demand, with the client only paying for what they use.

Other advantages include 99.9% guaranteed uptime and automatic data back-ups as well as built-in data recovery.