In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, host Russel Treat sits down with Jim Francis of ENTRUST Solutions Group to reflect on key insights from the recent AGA Pipeline Safety Management System (PSMS) Workshop.

Their discussion explores how PSMS implementation has evolved across the industry—from broader organizational engagement and leadership integration to advancements in data use and performance measurement. The conversation also touches on emerging themes like management review practices, the growing role of AI in safety management, and the continued maturation of safety culture across pipeline operations.

Learnings from the AGA PSMS Workshop Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Jim Francis is the Vice President of SMS Consulting at EN Engineering, or ENTRUST Solutions Group. Connect with Jim on LinkedIn.
  • ENTRUST Solutions Group provides comprehensive and dependable engineering, consulting, and automation services to pipeline companies, gas and electric utilities, and industrial customers.
• Pipeline SMS (Pipeline Safety Management Systems) or PSMS is an industry-wide focus to improve pipeline safety, driving toward zero incidents.
• AGA (American Gas Association) represents companies delivering natural gas safely, reliably, and in an environmentally responsible way to help improve the quality of life for their customers every day. AGA’s mission is to provide clear value to its membership and serve as the indispensable, leading voice and facilitator on its behalf in promoting the safe, reliable, and efficient delivery of natural gas to homes and businesses across the nation.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is the federal agency within USDOT responsible for providing pipeline safety oversight through regulatory rulemaking, NTSB recommendations, and other important functions to protect people and the environment through the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
• API (American Petroleum Institute) represents all segments of America’s natural gas and oil industry. API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
  • API 1173 established the framework for operators to implement Pipeline Safety Management Systems. The PSMS standard includes 10 core elements. The API Energy Excellence Program followed this model to establish its 13 core elements.
• The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle) is embedded in Pipeline SMS (API RP 1173) as a continuous quality improvement model consisting of a logical sequence of four repetitive steps for continuous improvement and learning.
• Operational Controls – Procedures and practices used to manage and mitigate risks in daily operations, ensuring activities are conducted safely and consistently.
• Risk Management – The process of identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, and mitigating risks to pipeline safety. Considered the foundational principle of PSMS.
• Stakeholder Engagement – The process of involving internal and external parties (e.g., employees, contractors, regulators, the public) in safety management and decision-making processes.
• Governance Process – The oversight structure ensuring that leadership commitment, accountability, and decision-making align with PSMS principles and organizational safety goals.
• Process Safety – Focuses on preventing unintentional releases of hazardous materials during operations by maintaining safe design, operation, maintenance, and procedures.
• Personal Safety – Often managed through HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment) programs; focuses on preventing injuries such as slips, trips, and falls. Distinct from process safety, which addresses system-level hazards.
• HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment) – A discipline focusing on protecting people, assets, and the environment through compliance with regulatory and organizational safety standards.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) – A U.S. federal agency that enforces workplace safety and health standards. Its programs focus on individual worker safety rather than holistic system safety management.
• ISO Standards – International standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization. Several mentioned include:
  • ISO 9001 – Quality Management Systems.
  • ISO 55001 – Asset Management Systems.
  • NXSL Framework – The shared structure used across ISO management system standards to ensure compatibility.
• Quality Management System (QMS) – A structured approach for managing quality through policies, processes, and continuous improvement. Often paralleled with safety management systems in structure and intent.
• Leadership and Management Commitment – A core PSMS element emphasizing visible support from top executives and managers for safety culture, policies, and continuous improvement.
• Safety Culture – The collective values, beliefs, and behaviors that determine how safety is prioritized and practiced across an organization.
• Process-to-Performance Linkage – The concept that operational processes should be directly measured and reviewed for their impact on overall safety performance.
• AI (Artificial Intelligence) – Referred to here as a tool for data analysis and risk identification in PSMS. Described as a “Very Large Algorithm (VLA)” that can analyze structured and unstructured data to uncover patterns and predict risks.
• Data Analytics in PSMS – The use of operational and safety data to identify trends, evaluate performance, and inform proactive risk mitigation strategies.
• Asset Management – The systematic management of physical pipeline assets to ensure safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance. Often aligns with ISO 55001 principles.
• Integrity Management – A regulatory-mandated program to ensure the structural integrity of pipelines through inspection, maintenance, and risk analysis.
• Damage Prevention Program (DPP) – A regulatory and operational initiative aimed at preventing excavation damage and other external threats to pipelines.
• DIMP – Distribution Integrity Management Program.
• TIMP – Transmission Integrity Management Program.
• Operational Excellence – The pursuit of improved safety, efficiency, and reliability through continuous improvement, data-driven decision-making, and effective management systems.
• Management System Maturity – The level of development and effectiveness in implementing a safety management system, ranging from initial adoption to full integration across all departments and disciplines.
• Control Hierarchy / Hierarchy of Controls – A framework for reducing risk by prioritizing engineering and administrative controls over personal protective measures.
• Control Room Management (CRM) – A regulatory framework and practice area ensuring that pipeline control rooms operate safely and effectively under PHMSA regulations.
• CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) – A U.S. government agency overseeing the security of critical infrastructure, including pipelines, particularly related to cybersecurity.
• NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) – An independent federal agency that investigates significant transportation accidents, including pipeline incidents, and issues safety recommendations.

Learnings from the AGA PSMS Workshop Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:

Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 410, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, operations and compliance software for the pipeline operator to address safety program management, control room management, and field operations. Find out more about POEMS at enersyscorp.com.

[background music]

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel:

Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Tanner Floyd with Audubon. Congratulations, Tanner. Your prize is on its way. To learn how you can win this prize, stick around until the end of the episode.

This week, we’re going to speak with Jim Francis of ENTRUST Solutions about the recent AGA Pipeline Safety Management System workshop and some of the things we learned in our attendance. Jim, Francis, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Jim Francis: Good to be back. It’s been a little bit, but it’s always great to see you again at the AGA.

Russel: Yeah. I always feel like I should have had three or four conversations with you since the last time I’ve seen you, because this is an area that’s a passion of mine. I always learn so much when we talk.

Jim: Life gets busy, I guess, and we got consumed by all of our work. It’s probably a good thing for us, right?

Russel: Yeah. We’re actually sitting here in my hotel room at the Disney World Yacht Club Resort in Orlando, that’s decorated with Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck, and I don’t know. Maybe that’ll set the mood for our conversation, don’t you think?

Jim: There you go. At least Goofy’s not here, right?

Russel: Yeah, that’s true. There’s no Goofy. That’s probably a good thing. I’ll do Goofy.

Jim: There you go.

Russel: Look, so we’re here at the AGA, and we’ve just wrapped up a little earlier today, the PSMS, the Pipeline Safety Management System, workshop. What was your key takeaway?

Jim:

First of all, one, there was 300 people in the room. When you think about the depth of people there, and actually, it’s even too the makeup of the folks.

There’s executives there, very high-level executives that were there, down to the engineers and everybody in between. You get the gamut of everybody that represents. What was interesting, too, is you used to get only the PSMS practitioners, but I saw folks that came in early just to go to the workshop that worked in construction, worked in engineering, worked in training, worked in all the aspects of it…

Russel: Control room, all kinds of things. That was compelling to me, is just the number of people in the room. Because I remember just two years ago, we were in a room that was full, and it was less than half, probably a quarter of what was in this room.

Jim:

Right. Agree. That, to me, was very encouraging. I also think it represents maybe the growth that we’ve seen in the people’s understanding of PSMS and their adoption of it.

A lot of the presentations were people who really exhibited their deep understanding of it. Now they’re starting to really drive into real opportunities to make improvements, reduce risk.

Russel: The new leadership at PHMSA — the new political leadership at PHMSA — put out an advisory notice saying, “Hey, we should all be doing PSMS, and we should accelerate that.” That probably helps.

Jim: Yeah, it certainly does. I know I’ve talked to a lot of our clients, where they’re interested in that. They struggled a little bit with, how do I respond to PHMSA? At the same time, the fact that PHMSA is interested in others along the way. How do you not respond to it? We’ve just seen the continued growth, which is great.

Russel: I certainly saw that. I think the other thing is the maturity of where we are in the conversation. What’s your take on where we are in the conversation about safety management versus where we were just two or three years ago?

Jim:

I get fewer questions about how to do whatever. People do start to understand. They understand the concepts in it much, much greater. They’re starting to engage their broader organizations much deeper.

It’s not just the people who are assigned the responsibility of being the PSMS champion or something within their organization, but it’s others who are understanding their roles.

I’m the guy who’s responsible for data, and they start to be able to connect the dots between what their processes are and some of the other things, and how do they help support the broader system. That piece of it is indicative of maturity around it as well.

Then, the way people are measuring performance, the way that they are starting to use data and other things to drive it. I love the last presentation in there around AI and how that’s…

You can see the future two or three years from now. We’re going to have, perhaps, a vastly different conversation about how we’re identifying and flushing out risk. That’s the stuff that I really encourage to see in the growth.

Russel:

We’re going to come back to the AI conversation. There was certainly a couple of things that I thought were thematic and go to where we are as an industry, particularly in the utility space. One is that, like three years ago, there were people talking about different team structures for how they’re going to do it.

This time, pretty much everybody, even the big guys, had one or two people in key roles, and they’re facilitating stuff for a bunch of others. There’s nobody, at least none of the conversations this round, were about, “I’m building this PSMS organization.”

Jim:

Yeah. It’s the panel discussion where they talked about — they called them the little operators, but they weren’t little operators. They were groups that had few resources that were dedicated to it.

You get the one-person and the two-person organizations, and their job becomes, “How do I manage and implement this thing effectively? How do I really start to, I don’t know, change the culture and permeate the organization in the right way?” They seem to be very effective at it.

Russel:

A lot of their conversation is, what are the mechanisms for getting this out to the people so that they understand what it is? They’re working it into position descriptions. They’re working it into job roles. They’re working it into work procedures, that kind of thing.

They’re taking that responsibility. They’re just adding it. It becomes another list on the item as a manager that I’m responsible for in my group, or as a worker, I’m responsible for in my job.

Jim:

It’s funny. Actually, I still have the presentation that I did in 2016 at the Versed PSMS. This was the 10-year anniversary of 1173. This is the 10th workshop that AGA has done, and I still have my presentation.

I’ve gone back to that on a number of occasions to see what was our thinking at the time to implement it. We started with risk management, which naturally got us into stakeholder engagement, which naturally got us into having a governance process. You’ve got leadership and management commitment. You still have a few key things, and those folks talked about the same things.

Nothing has really changed in regard to that as an effective way to go implement.

Russel: It’s an interesting point. I think you’re right. I think the strategy that people came up with is right, at least so far.

Jim:

Agree. You got to engage your leaders. We heard that. You got to make sure your stakeholders are participating in the system, and it’s all about managing risk. That’s where they spend their time and focused on it.

You still see certain organizations have maybe better processes that align to certain elements more than others, but those three areas are key. Maybe that’s why they’re one, two, and three in the system.

Russel:

One of the things I remember, I don’t remember who did it, but one of the presentations they were talking about, they formed a team and they took the elements and they went through the organization, had a whole bunch of meetings, and just collected things that needed to occur.

It wasn’t so much about, are we doing this or not, because most of it, if they were doing, it’s just that, “We’re doing it, but we’re not documenting it, and we’re not analyzing it for improvement.”

Jim: I think that’s because they understand risk management better now, where risk management largely has been viewed, perhaps, as integrity management. That’s mature process. Now people are starting to understand maybe the process safety side of it. Even in the new iteration of the standards, it’s going to have a whole annex on process safety management.

Russel: I guess my take’s a little different. I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I don’t mean to disagree with you. It’s just another viewpoint. I think that what people are realizing is we’re doing most of this already. We’re just not measuring, and we’re just not recording. What needs to shift is we need to measure and record.

Jim: They have to prove, right? They have to prove it at some point that they are putting their resources in the right place and they’re actually reducing risk.

Russel: I can’t do an analytical process if I have no…

Jim: No data.

Russel: process or data to analyze.

Jim: Exactly.

Russel: I’ve got to get processing data in place so I can do the analysis.

Jim:

And it’s funny. Our company, we facilitate risk input sessions. We call them a lot of times with operators. We start talking to departments. They see the process and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this is an avenue for me to fix some of the issues that I know exist within my group.”

Then the bringing them all together now starts to create those connections between the disparate processes, which if you read the Standard, it talks about these different processes relate to each other and they create these complex systems. That’s where problems happen.

Russel:

That’s right. That’s right. Deming talked about that in his work, that a process is a complex sequence of steps. When you’re inside a department…This is actually something else that was talked about. I want to talk about this a little bit. I’ve talked about this before, but I think it’s really key.

Some of the organizations they were talking about, “Well, we’re completely separate from HSE.” Another organization is, “We’re in HSE.” The question was asked, “Don’t you step on one another if you’re in HSE?”

For me, when I think HSE, my moniker is slips, trips, and falls. It’s really personal safety. Am I protecting myself? Is the company protecting me as a person? Versus process safety, which is, is the system operating in a safe way? Those are certainly related, but they are not the same thing.

Jim:

No, they’re not. I also think your EHNS folks are so historically ingrained in all of the OSHA requirements. They’ve lived it for so long that making that shift to operating in a management system environment and a structure is more challenging.

I experienced the same thing 10 years ago when we were creating this, because I was creating the management system along with my EHNS safety director.

As I’ve seen this play out with some of my clients, they still have that challenge and that battle between those two groups figuring out, where’s the ownership? What am I really trying to do to mitigate risk, and how does the system actually work?

Russel: Who…? I’m trying to figure out a way to frame this question. It’s interesting. I’ve done over 400 of these podcasts now. At first, I didn’t know enough to ask other than just general questions. Now, having done 400 of these things, I’m finding myself often having to pause a minute and frame a question up. Here’s what I want to frame up. OSHA Safety, is that a safety management system?

Jim:

I think OSHA safety is the operational controls section of the employee health and safety portion. The things that you have to do, the reasons why those things are in place, is there was an issue somewhere and somebody put a control in place. It’s certainly a part of the system, but it doesn’t represent the entirety of the system.

You can’t go necessarily to the OSHA standards per se and find, what does my risk management process have to look like?

Russel: You’re asserting in your conversation that risk management has to be a part of safety management.

Jim: Absolutely. Yeah. Read the Standard. It’s all about risk management. It’s all about mitigating risk. You improve safety performance by mitigating risk.

Russel: Look, I’m playing devil’s advocate because I agree with you, but I think this is a conversation that’s out there in the ether that people are wrestling with. I would argue that OSHA is a safety management system. It’s just the scope is smaller.

Jim: Maybe. I don’t know that you go to OSHA regulations and you see the components of the management system.

Russel: No.

Jim: You go to equality, you go to one of the ISO standards, you can see a management system framework. There’s environmental management system frameworks.

Russel: They’ve been built a piece at a time as things occurred.

Jim: Right, exactly. It’s a responsive thing because the management system is supposed to drive us to more proactive mitigation.

Russel:

Right. I think that’s the distinction, that the personal safety is more reactive to the way injuries occur.

We’re collecting data about injuries that occur, and then we’re coming up with mitigating practices to minimize those injuries. Versus what we’re looking at in safety management is we have incidents that ideally aren’t occurring, and we’re trying to make sure they never occur. That’s different in a very material way.

Jim:

That’s why I think there’s a little bit of a battle between the groups, because, what is my means? Like, in 1173, they talk about risk management is the planning piece. Where do I spend my time? Go look at the risks that you have that are out there.

As you talked about earlier, go collect the information from all the different departments and people and bring them together. Now go, “Where do we spend our time? Can’t do it all.”

Russel: How do I set my priorities?

Jim: Yeah, exactly.

Russel:

The other thing that we’re going to discover, I think a lot of people are going to go out and do those inventories. They’re just going to do that risk collection…

[crosstalk]

Russel:

There’s going to be a lot of things that are largely administrative.

We need to paper this. We need to formalize this into a record. We need to modify a procedure, or a policy, or something. There’ll be a lot of relatively small administrative things that we need to do, and then we get to do the hard work.

Jim:

Yeah, that is true. I think the Standard, because you have the operational controls aspect of it, naturally gets you to look at your operating procedures and things like that. There is a focus, and I hear this actually from clients a lot, maybe more on the electric side than I do on the gas side, which is, how do we use the hierarchy controls?

How do we really start to drive and identify the engineering controls and the substitutions and those things that are higher on the control pyramid? How do we start to use those more effectively or really focus on those to drive out risk?

Maybe it’s the difference between an electric system and a pipeline system. There’s such a heavy focus around assets and asset management in pipeline systems because of integrity management and all that. Not quite so much on the electric side.

Russel: You could certainly argue that there ought to be on the electric side.

Jim: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Russel: Particularly in the distribution systems.

Jim: I actually had that discussion with somebody down here this week.

Russel: Side topic. Have you read “California Burning”?

Jim: I have not. I’m aware of it, but I have not read it yet.

Russel:

It’s a great read. I thought it was going to be something very different than what it turned out to be, but it’s a history book, and I love history. It’s just the history of that infrastructure being created to generate electricity in California, and the regulatory environment that grew up alongside of it and why.

It’s fascinating. It talks about the fires, and the electrical issues, and all that stuff. It’s really, really fascinating. Anyways, side conversation. I want to talk a little bit about management review because that was talked about a bit. What was your takeaway from a management review standpoint? Where are we with SMS management review?

Jim:

I hear this actually as feedback. I can’t remember if it was something that the AGA did or somebody else surveyed the industry about which of the elements were more challenging. They did this a few years back, and I think it was the operational controls.

Now, we’ve gotten to the point where a management review is one that shows up. But because there’s been so much focus around all the other elements, now the management review is on the back end of it.

We’re trying to figure out, how do we wrap our arms around all the information and how do we get feedback from all the stakeholders? That can be such a comprehensive thing, and it can be a beast to some extent. I’ve seen management review reports that are 20, 30, 40 pages long.

How do you make heads or tails out of that and really focus on it? Because most people’s goals and the objectives are four or five things. Ultimately, that’s what the management review starts with.

Did you achieve the goals and the objectives you set out? But there’s so many layers of other things that happen. We’re supposed to be applying the management review not only to the PSMS, but all the programs and the things that make up it. This week, as an example, we heard one of the presenters talk about it in terms of each of the elements gets their management review.

The Standard requires management reviews, multiple of them, which either infers you’re going to do a management review for each element, or you’re going to do a management review for each program that contributes to your PSMS, your DEMP, your TEMP, your damage prevention, all of those programs.

Frankly, we probably ought to do both. How do we really start to narrow in on the things we ought to improve?

Russel:

Yeah. I asked a question of one of the presenters because he mentioned that they had implemented ISO 55001. Which is an asset management standard, but it’s part of what ISO calls their NXSL, which is a family of standards that are all written around ISO 9001, which is their quality management standard.

Quality management is the other side of the coin of safety management. Quality management is managing to get to a particular result. Safety management is managing to not get to a particular result. They’re very closely related, and the science is the same.

I asked the question of are you normalizing your review? The answer was we gave somebody element one, and they both have an element one, and that’s how we’re doing the review, which I think is problematic.

I’ll tell you why. I want to hear your perspective on this, why I’m teeing this up. If you think about all the standards that you would have in, if you were to talk about an operations management system. I’d have to have something for how I’m going to do all my pipeline integrity? How am I doing my damage prevention?

How am I doing my cyber security? How am I doing my field operations? And so on and so forth, right? They’re all going to have their own standards, and they’re all going to have their elements, and they’re going to, even at the policy level, that starts getting complex.

Then if I’m going to say you know what, I’m governed by OSHA and I got to do some reviews on my OSHA program, and I’m governed by 1173 and I got to do those reviews and then I have regulatory required reviews that I have to do. Holy crap. How do I manage that in a way that that’s effective?

Jim: Because they specifically separate management and leadership. Like in the case of, I have somebody who owns element one, it’s at a leadership level. In the standard, it talks about top management, but the business processes are owned by a manager, and more likely the manager owns a process, not the entirety of all the systems.

Russel: If you break that down, a VP is going to own policy, a director is going to own a department, and a manager is going to own a process, typically. It’s a little over-simplification, but there’s a lot of truth in that.

Jim:

Actually, when we talked earlier about the advancement of the safety management systems, this is probably an area where we’re still relatively immature. Me, as a manager, I should be doing a management review of the work that I do and my processes that I own. Then your system should aggregate all of that information and the results of.

Top management and thinking about all the asset management processes, there’s a lot underneath all of that. You need to make sure those things are all connected. I always think about the biggest fear I would have was, did my integrity team, as an example, make the right decisions on which assessments? Am I doing the right thing?

Russel: Did they identify the right features to assess? Did they dig the right features that needed to be digged?

Jim: That’s only one department that makes up your asset management programs and all the other things. How do you bring all of that together? That, to me, is the challenge of management review. At the end of the year, that’s what the leadership should be graded on. Did we or did we not achieve it? The managers should be graded on their processes. That sets the tone for next year’s plan.

Russel: That tees up a perfect segue. The last presentation of the workshop was on AI. It was by DTE. They were talking about their…I would just call it an experimental project around AI. I think they were using Copilot. Is that…

Jim: Yeah.

Russel: Of all the AIs to pick, I don’t know why you’d pick Copilot, other than you’re just a Microsoft shop.

Jim: Could be. I’m a Copilot user, admittedly.

Russel:

I’m not. That’ll spin me off into a whole conversation about Microsoft knows too much about me as it is. What I find really fascinating, I listened to a four-hour-long podcast that Sean Ryan did. I can’t remember the name of the gentleman. It was the guy who is the presidential advisor for AI. He’s helping to set national policy around AI.

He talked a lot about what’s going on in China and so forth. He gave me the best example of what AI actually is. I wish we didn’t use the word “AI” because it’s an incorrect moniker. If you call it a VLA, a very large algorithm, that’s more what it is.

Jim:

I had a colleague a couple years ago, and I was talking to her about how do we start to use these tools. She said, “Look, at the end of the day, it’s the underlying data that is the value.” If your data is poor, even if you’re using that AI and that’s the tool that you use to go mine the data out of it, it’s going to give you incomplete information.

That’s still the challenge. Maybe there’s opportunities to get disparate information from different systems to fill in the gaps. Maybe that’s the hope here.

Russel:

AI has a huge amount of value. Three years from now, we’re going to have a very different understanding. It’s moving incredibly fast. I’m doing work in it. We’ve got some R&D stuff going on with it.

It’s just very large algorithm. One of the beauties of it is the data doesn’t need to be structured. You just need to point it at data. That’s one of the advantages. You can get something of value just pointing it at the data.

Jim:

In the Quality Management Committee, there was a couple discussions around quality control. Now we’re creating yet another data source. Now you’re connecting the risks to the controls to the improvements around that, which then creates another amount of data, which then we can start to mine and go, “How effective are we at actually implementing our safety management system?”

Maybe it gives you another layer of data. That, to me, where I’m like, “Oh my gosh. We’re going to be able to maybe pinpoint where we should be spending our time as a result of quick analysis.”

Russel:

One of the things it does is I can point it at unstructured data. I can point it at a file server full of PDF documents, which, if I tried to do any other kind of approach to anything with that data, it’d be virtually impossible.

I can point it at a database. I can point it at the Internet and news feeds and blah, blah, blah. I can point it at PHMSA and NTSB and CISA. I can point it at all these big data sets. I can get an answer to a question, but I can’t get the answer, necessarily. I get an inference.

However, if I pointed at all the data in my company and I ask it two questions, one being “What patterns are you seeing that I should be paying attention to?” You got to frame that more specifically. That’s in general terms. The other is “What data do I not have that I need in order to be able to effectively manage my risk?”

That’s where AI is going to drive value. What it’s going to do is it’s going to change the engineer’s job from pulling the data together to figure out how to interpret what the AI is telling me and get better answers out of the AI so that I can get to the actual answer.

Jim: The hope is that maybe, as our work management systems and our asset management systems are becoming more complete and more sophisticated maybe or maybe more real-time,, now we have the ability maybe to start to flag these things and opportunities to go mitigate a risk before it becomes the incident.

Russel: If we can get down to the level of the Swiss cheese and actually train the AI to look for the Swiss cheese lining up, then we have some real opportunity to really reduce risk. Like I’m looking at all the job records. There’s this one area that we’ve been doing work. I feel like that work’s not really the work we needed to be doing. You need to go look at this.

Jim: It’ll be a fascinating PSMS workshop, like you say, in a couple of years.

Russel: What’s going to happen…I fully expect…I wouldn’t be surprised to see this PMS workshop break out and be a whole nother conference and have working committees within it.

Jim:

That’s what the intent, obviously, with a committee like quality management. It was interesting being in the room today. I’m like, “We got another massive room, which means there’s a lot of people involved and interested in it.” They’re already breaking that group up because there’s such intensity, I guess, around it.

It’s like a football field. I was thinking to myself, “I don’t think I could throw a ball to meet the other end of the room.” Now we’ve got all these people. They get it. Again, that shows the maturity.

Russel:

That’s right. My key takeaway is the industry is invested. The investment’s increasing. The understanding of what needs to happen is maturing, but we’ve still got a long ways to go, a really long ways to go.

Tell the listeners, if you would, Jim, a little bit about who you work for and what you do.

Jim:

I’ve been in the industry for 34 years. In the last four years, I’ve been able to work for ENTRUST Solutions Group. I lead our safety management system team, which is part of our consulting organization. We do a fair amount of work in process safety and integrity and all the other things. My team just so happens to focus on safety management systems.

Not specifically API 1173. We work with companies on ANSI Z10 and some other standards. We’ll work on the quality management system standard. They all have a similarity to them. Process-wise, we’re able to take the best practices and help our clients figure out how do they implement these things effectively.

Russel: Do you do any of the Chemical Safety Board risk-based process management?

Jim: We have a whole different sister group that does process safety management, all those things.

Russel: Here’s my final question for you. I do a lot of work in midstream on the gathering side. A lot of the gatherers are also processors. They’re operating under PSM and 1173. PSM is a subset of what you would find in risk-based safety management from a Chemical Safety Board perspective. How well aligned are those two programs? Is it 5 percent, 95 percent? Where is it?

Jim: They’re probably closer to the 95, but not quite there. It’s interesting though. We have clients that we’re working with on PSMS, and they have PSM. They keep them separated. Part of it is because they maybe have a hard time understanding, if I have to comply with an OSHA reg or if I have to comply with…

Russel: What happens is I tend to organize my processes by compliance. rather than processes by how I operate and then figure the compliance out.

Jim: When we see them, they have a management of change process. It’s really no different. We just need to make sure that it…

Russel: There are some fundamental distinctions.

Jim: You can apply the concepts.

Russel: They’re in the details.

Jim: Exactly.

Russel: The pillars are very much the same. They’re not exactly the same, but they’re very much the same. When you get into the details, operating controls are different for plants versus pipelines, and for good reason.

Jim: Agree. Those operating procedures need to be different. Part of the challenge there is figuring out which of those processes that you can use across the two. It’s more of an integrated approach. We talk to a lot of companies about that.

Russel: The answer for…If I were king of the world or if I were running any kind of company that’s doing more than one kind of operation, I’d have an integrated operations management system. That would be what I do. Then I would rationalize that against all the regulatory things based on the details.

Jim: Over the last year, we’ve spent more time having that kind of conversation with our clients about how do we integrate these systems.

Russel:

I actually think that’s where we’re going to head. If you’re a gas utility and all you do is gas utility, then 1173 and SMS is fine. If you start looking at comprehensive risk and you get it outside of the operating construct and you get it into the commercial construct and the financial construct and so forth, then I got to look at this for cyber.

I got to look at this for my financial. If I’m public, I got to look at it from that standpoint. It’s fundamentally all the same process. The challenge, circling back…This is my theory. I haven’t been able to prove it yet, but I’m trying to walk it out.

My theory is, if I can get to one set of structures so that my management reviews are against that single set of structures and my compliance reviews are against the compliance requirements versus my standard structure, then I can really improve my efficiency and safety in operations.

If I try to come at it from a compliance standpoint and I have more than one compliance criteria, I’m never going to get there.

Jim: If you set up the system in a way so me, as a manager, once again, knows how to execute it…I set my goals and objectives. I create my plan. I do my risk assessment. It’s not any different if I own cybersecurity or pipeline safety.

Russel: No.

Jim: Agree.

Russel:

If I’m owning cybersecurity and I’ve got an electric department and they’re NERC CIP and I’ve got a pipeline and they’re ISO 27001 and I’ve got a plant and they’re NIST 800, well OK. I don’t care. I do it all the same way. It’s just which lens do you want to take and look at my program from.

Now you heard it here first. I heard Jim say it. That’s what we should all do because Jim said it.

Jim: Keep working there, people.

Russel: Look, thanks for taking the time to come by and talk to me. I always enjoy it. I always regret that we don’t do it more often.

Jim: Thanks for having me, Russel.

Russel:

I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the “Pipeliners Podcast” and our conversation with Jim. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

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Russel:

If you have ideas, questions, or topics, or even if you’d be interested in being a guest, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

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