This episode of the Pipeliners Podcast features a conversation with Ross Adams, of EnerSys Corporation, about the importance of implementing a Pipeline Operations Management System (OMS).

The discussion examines challenges faced in control rooms, such as alignment across departments and regulatory compliance, and highlights how OMS can create top-down governance to improve efficiency and safety.

The episode also explores practical steps for assessing the need for an OMS and how to approach its development.

Operations Management System for Pipelines Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Ross Adams is the General Manager of EnerSys Corporation. Connect with Ross on LinkedIn.
  • Listen to Ross’ previous appearances on the Pipeliners Podcast.
  • EnerSys Corporation is a recent sponsor of the Pipeliners Podcast. Find out more about how EnerSys supports the pipeline control room through compliance, audit readiness, and control room management through the POEMS Control Room Management (CRM Suite) software suite.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is 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.
• The CRM Rule (Control Room Management Rule as defined by 49 CFR Parts 192 and 195) introduced by PHMSA provides regulations and guidelines for control room managers to safely operate a pipeline. PHMSA’s pipeline safety regulations prescribe safety requirements for controllers, control rooms, and SCADA systems used to remotely monitor and control pipeline operations.
• Pipeline Operations Management System (OMS): A comprehensive framework designed to integrate processes, governance, and technology for improving pipeline efficiency, safety, and regulatory compliance.
• Top-Down Governance: A management approach where policies, decisions, and oversight come from higher levels of an organization, ensuring alignment and consistency across departments.
• Regulatory Compliance: The adherence to industry and government regulations that oversee pipeline operations, such as ensuring safety protocols and operational standards are met.
• Safety Performance: A measure of how well an organization prevents accidents and incidents, particularly in high-risk environments like pipeline operations.
• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) regulates, monitors, and investigates electricity, natural gas, hydropower, oil matters, natural gas pipelines, LNG terminals, hydroelectric dams, electric transmission, energy markets, and pricing.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is an agency in the United States Department of Labor. Their mission is to “assure safe and healthy working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training, outreach, education, and assistance.”

Operations Management System for Pipelines Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 366, 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.

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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. To show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Christopher Thurness with Marathon. Congratulations, Christopher. Your YETI’s on its way. To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week we speak to Ross Adams about the need for a pipeline operations management system. Hey, Ross. Welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Ross Adams: Hey, great to be back. It’s been a while.

Russel: It’s been a while, man. What have you been doing?

Ross: Working hard. [laughs] I’ve been on the road a lot this year. We’ve been really busy and work with a lot of folks all over the country, so excited for that, but certainly have missed being able to rejoin you here. Good news is I get a lot of road time, so I get a lot of tune-in to the podcast.

Russel: Well, that’s awesome. I know you’ve been burning up the air miles. Hopefully next year you have top-tier privileges, so take as much grief and aggravation out of the flying as possible.

Ross: Fingers crossed.

Russel: [laughs] Fingers crossed, that’s right. Look, I asked you to come back. I wanted to have a free-flowing conversation here and talk about a conversation that we had in our recent POEMS user group meeting about some of the challenges in the control room and some of the work that we’re doing that might help to address that.

Let me just ask you. What is a general rule or the kind of things you’re hearing from control room managers and people who work around control rooms about the challenges that they’re up against? What part of CRM are they really struggling to get done?

Ross: It’s a great question. It’s timely. I’m currently going through…It’s an end of year rigor that I do, all of the PHMSA audit findings. We do a scrub of those and look for trends and things that PHMSA is pointing out.

I’m not quite far enough into it yet to speak intelligently to it, but we keep beating the drum around how PHMSA is ratcheting down and raising expectations and designing procedures and all the rest. I’d say that that’s certainly a big piece of what control room managers still seem to be working with or working against at times.

More than anything else, I was talking to you earlier. I was recalling, I joined EnerSys about seven and a half years ago now. It’s still true in some cases, but at the time, people were talking about the control room as if it was a broom closet. Out of sight, out of mind. Not a lot of people understood what the control room was for or what its purpose was or really even how to use it well.

Over time, through the effort of a lot of really talented people working in control rooms across the country and the continuous focus on the control room management rule and then, of course, the rise in technology, the control room isn’t that broom closet anymore.

It’s certainly a big piece of safe and effective pipeline operations. If anything, it’s really about continuing to mature in our level of understanding around where the control room fits, how best to utilize it.

Given the fact that it is this arbiter of information and data, really, that spans the entirety of our pipeline operations, how can we as a company best serve our control room so that our control room can best serve our company and our level of compliance and our operations and, of course, our pursuit of pipeline safety.

That conversation is one control room managers are having. It’s one that they’re leaning into and learning more about as we press forward in CRM.

Russel: There was a particular conversation that you had at the user group about the need for an operations management system. How did that specifically come up? What was driving that conversation?

Ross: A buzzword, operations management system. We’ll define that here in a second. Just to give some context, we were at our user group meeting — it’s annual — annual focus group of people using the EnerSys POEMS software and solutions, a great group of folks, really talented, a lot of different operating types.

We were having a conversation about change management and specifically this concept of departmental MOCs. There’s large corporate MOCs that your companies will use, but then, within that, there’s a lot of department-level activity that are best-geared for individual departments to run.

For example, a control room might be managing things like point-to-point verification, alarm rationalization, 1165 review, controller training, set point review, etc. We were talking about the right workflow or the right approach to getting all those things done when a change is going to occur.

We were circling this pain point of, as all those things have to happen, there’s information the control room needs from other resources. For example, the control room needs a processing criteria from the engineering group, as well as the outcomes of that process and criteria, for the determination of alarm set points or the determination of what’s safety-related.

The control room needs the HMI to be built and for there to be verification that it’s in accordance with 1165 and so on. There’s things that the control room is waiting on to do the things that they have to do. Often, those things come at the last minute, but then the control room is also facing this pressure from operations, from the field to implement.

“We just found about this change yesterday. It’s going live tomorrow” is the conversation that it’s going on, really, in a lot of places. As we were leaning into that conversation, understanding where the pain was, the pull from both ends, if you will, to perform in a tight window, we started to talk about what the solution might be.

Really, you think about it. The problem is that there’s silos within an organization. The control room management rule has specific expectations for what other groups are doing to support the control room that they probably don’t know about. We’ve come a long way in helping people get educated in that regard, but it’s still a challenge.

Where we landed…I asked a question of the folks in the room, “Would be helpful if you had some kind of top-down governance that dictated how all those different groups ought to work together?” There were resounding head nods throughout the room.

To me, that’s an operations management system. It’s that top-down governance that helps make sure that everyone gets what they need to be successful and that everyone’s working together collaboratively to ensure that compliance and that safety and that effectiveness that are really our goals in our control rooms, but also in our companies.

Russel: That’s a great tee-up. Really, what you’re driving at is, how do we deal with alignment across the organization, particularly in organizations in those areas where that alignment may have not historically been needed or existed.

You used a couple examples. There’s other examples in the world of integrity management. I know integrity management has become…There’s a lot of people doing work to try and combine corrosion monitoring and tool runs and inspections, which often are done by different departments within the pipeline.

I know that there are implications between what I do in integrity management and, when I derate a pipe, causing it to be operated at a lower pressure, what does that do to me. Likewise, what happens if I’m in the control room and I’m cycling pressure more than what I might otherwise need to? What does that do to me from an integrity standpoint?

From my perspective, there’s a lot of that. The companies that are trying to implement pipeline safety management or trying to be more thorough in how they’re doing their approach to PHMSA compliance are starting to uncover these things where there’s a lack of alignment or lack of understanding across the organization as a whole.

We have been asked by a few of our customers — it’s some of the stuff that I’m personally working on — to help people write an OMS. It might be a little bit helpful to talk about what is an OMS and where does that idea come from, just historically.

An OMS is an operations management system. It’s exactly what you said. It’s top-down governance for how you operate the company. If you were to think about that, the thing in pipelining that most resembles an OMS is API 1173 and pipeline safety management because it addresses the totality of all the things you should be doing to operate a pipeline safely and effectively.

The challenge becomes, for a lot of organizations, particularly some of the midstream organizations that are gathering oil, that are gathering gas…They’re processing oil. I don’t mean refining, but the things that you do in gathering to get gravity separated and to get water out of the oil and those sorts of things.

You’ve got gas companies that are midstream that are running fractionators. Those guys are covered by completely different regulatory frameworks, like OSHA and PSM. Now, all of a sudden, I need to get really clear about how do I run my pipeline and how do I run my plant.

Oftentimes, it’s not as easy as you think it should be to just draw a line and say, “This is pipeline, and this is plant.” There’s a little bit of practical definition that needs to occur.

For operators that have these varied and more complex operations, they really want a holistic operations plan that’s outside of any regulatory framework because a lot of times you’re dealing with multiple regulatory frameworks for these types of things. A long diatribe.

You’re absolutely right. An OMS is a top-down management system, a governance system for how we operate. It’s been done for a lot of years. The airline industry does it with the way they do airline safety management or aviation Safety Management. It’s been done in manufacturing for years as total quality management or Six Sigma and other brand names that it’s been given.

It’s done, to some degree, in PSM under the OSHA program for plants. All of that builds a framework. Probably the best framework that’s out there that I’ve seen is ISO 9001, which is quality management systems. It is designed to be a capstone document.

There’s something called Annex SL, which has other documents, like facilities management, environmental health and safety management, environmental management, information technology, systems management. There’s this whole family of guidelines that address all the various departments that provide a framework for how you go about building an OMS. A long diatribe about all that.

I do think, to your point, there is a need to begin to answer these questions where that effective work across the departments within an organization isn’t what we need it to be.

Ross: I’m listening. As a listener, one of your listeners, the questions probably come in this order. Do I need an OMS? How do I know if I need one? How do I know if my company is ready for one? You’ve already addressed the follow-up, which is, if we say the answer is yes, then where do I start looking? The ISO is a great place. ISO 9001 is a great place to look.

Russel: Let me talk to that a little bit, the question, “Do I need one?” What I’m finding with many of the companies that I’m working with is they have very good policy and procedure documents at the departmental level. They’ll have a control room plan. They’ll have an integrity management plan. They’ll have a damage prevention plan, etc. They’ll tend to have good departmental plans.

If there’s friction between those departments…When I say friction, I don’t necessarily mean people not getting along. I just mean there’s ambiguity or confusion or not clear guidance about how those departments should be collaborating. That’s when you need a OMS.

Ross: That makes sense. That ambiguity can come from a lot of different root causes. It’s not uncommon in industry for companies to have, really, a little bit of Frankenstein’s monster in there.

As leadership changes over time and all the rest, they piece together philosophically or even in practice. That creates rub in all areas. Sounds like an OMS helps get everyone lined out the right way and working together towards a common outcome.

Russel: That’s exactly right. You asked another question about what’s involved or where do you start. I’ve talked about ISO 9001. The most important thing for anybody who’s going to try and undertake an OMS, it has to have a very high level of sponsorship in the organization.

You’re basically going to be creating structure around a whole bunch of stuff, going to “This is how I’m going to operate.” The OMS, the owner of that document is going to be the senior operations executive in a company. Important that that person is bought into “Yes, we need to do this.”

Ross: Is that easier said than done?

Russel: That’s a really good, very interesting question. What I’m finding is the organization often thinks that’s going to be hard to do, but the senior operations executive or the senior operations executive team really wants to have it in place. Senior leadership wants it and maybe doesn’t know how to get there. The next level maybe doesn’t really understand what the need for it is or how to get there 3so it’s a really interesting question.

I have not found that senior leadership is saying, “No, no. This is not something we need to do.” I’ve not found that at all. In fact, quite the opposite. What I found is, “Yes,” and then they’re looking for, “How are we going to get it done?”

Because the other thing I would say is senior leadership doesn’t have the time to sit in a room for three days and figure out how to make this work.

Ross: Well, it probably makes sense that folks that are at a senior level, they’re oriented towards running a company, understand the value of corporate governance.

Applying that through the lens of pipeline operations is just an extension of a philosophy that they’re already used to or familiar with.

Russel: I think that’s exactly right, Ross. Most people in that role, they’re going to snap to it really quickly. It’s just a matter of they have to have the right kind of help.

The other thing I would say is a lot of organizations have tried to put something like this in place and failed. I think it’s because they make the project too big.

Let me try to unpack that a little bit, because that’s maybe a little hard for me to crystalize my thinking around.

If I go to a Big Six consulting firm and say, “I need to create an OMS,” they’re going to send me a team of people. That team of people is going to organize a whole bunch of meetings, and they’re going to make it a big effort. They’re going to talk to a whole lot of people and such.

My thinking is it’s really more effective if you can find the agreement in the company and the problems that need to be solved, those things that, if I resolve these conflicts, I’m going to create lift, and come up with an approach that does that and doesn’t try to get me all the way from where I am now to where I’d like to be in five years.

One of the things I would tell people to be aware of is be conscious you need to manage the scope on this stuff.

Russel Treat. That makes sense. You mentioned earlier, right, a lot of companies already have a lot of existing departmental documentation in governance. Does it make sense to look at two different departments and start to blend them together under a corporate philosophy, and then grow from there, or what does this process look like?

Ross: The answer I think is yes. It makes sense. It depends on what the nature of the challenge the company is struggling with. If the struggle I’m having is between the field operations team and the control room, then what I want to do is workshop with those people, find out the conflicts, try to get that clear, look at the existing documents, and say, “What do I need to create as a capstone? Then let’s rework those documents underneath it.”

When I say documents, the big thing about an OMS, typically, it manifests as a set of documents. I want to write a bunch of policy and procedure…more policy and maybe some process, but higher-level documents.

Really, I’m not doing that. What I’m really trying to do is build consensus in the organization about, “This is how we operate and these are the things that would help us do that more effectively.” As I’m saying this, it sounds to me like I’m babbling a little bit. I don’t know how clear I’m being about this.

Russel: I like that you’re testing on what it looks like. I think it’s really important. Otherwise, OMS is just another business buzzword synergy thing, and we’re not really sure what it is and what it means to us. Of course, in OMS, we talk a lot about program management, process management, task execution, and how the three of those things really merge together to make systems.

Program management, that’s policy, when you’re talking about process. Is there a task execution element to this as well? Then maybe as it relates to KPIs and verifying that OMS is working, does that look like OBC with PSMS, or is it something different?

Russel: Good question. The thing about building an OMS or doing PSMS is it’s not about something I do and it has an end result. It’s about a capability I’m creating. It’s about a way of creating, in the organization as a whole, a way of thinking and a way of working, a way of working and a way of thinking about the work. That’s what it really is.

It’s very much a cultural thing more than anything else. There’s a lot in it around process. To try and distinguish, process is why and what. Process is not who and how. Who and how is more about procedure. Tasks are more about procedure. Processes are more about…

For example — we’ll come back to the control room because that’s what you and I are most familiar with — if I’m making a change to a SCADA screen, then I have to have a process for, one, understanding who other than me is impacted by this change.

I have to have a process for determining what is the scope and effort necessary to implement the change and what’s the risk of that I create and/or avoid by doing it. Then I’ve got to come up with a cost of execution.

Then I have to have a plan for execution and training and orientation of the team. That’s a process, lots of sub-parts. Processes can be somewhat generic. Procedures tend to be quite specific.

Ross: Makes sense.

Russel: I hope I’m answering the question there.

Ross: Certainly. You are because the second half of my question was about KPIs and tracking performance. If it’s a cultural implementation, or a cultural impact, I should say, there probably are ways to track performance, but it’s less procedural, like PSMS might be.

Russel: It’s more about what results are you trying to get to. If you think about what are the things I measure from a safety performance standpoint, it’s — I’m trying to think of some good examples — things like, how many alarms am I getting? How quickly am I able to work an alarm and have it clear? How many integrity tool runs am I doing?

What am I identifying in the way of corrective action? How quickly am I able to get those actions implemented? Those are the kinds of things that you would be looking at from a KPI standpoint. They’re more about, what are my corporate goals, and am I accomplishing them?

Ross: The lift, because it’s cultural, will be experiential. For a control room manager, where their SCADA department, their engineering group, their field personnel, and their control room are all governed under a common operating philosophy with a common governance, the way in which those groups work together and serve each other for a common outcome is increased.

Some of this pain that we’re hearing from control room managers, about not necessarily the time crunch or the resource crunch or whatever it happens to be, those wrinkles start to fade out, get ironed out.

Russel: That’s exactly right. What you should have happen is that the processes get modified. People begin to become oriented around those new processes. From that, they get to the goals they’re trying to achieve, which, in our world, is deliver the product, deliver it on spec, do it without impact, at the highest level.

Ross: Well-said.

Russel: Anyways, what I would say to anybody that’s thinking about this, do I need an OMS, etc., there are some good resources out there. I would tell anybody to start with ISO 9001 and Annex SL, Sam Lima, which is a whole library of framework documents, and just orient yourself to what all that is.

Then the next thing is, where can I gain value by operating more in alignment across the organization. That’s the next question to answer. Most of us, if we look at that, those answers become pretty evident pretty quick. I know they do for me, even in our business.

Ross: Absolutely. I would imagine this seems, if I had to guess, to be a conversation that is just starting to pop its head up and one we’ll have to stay tuned for. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of educated folks talking about this topic down the road.

It’s a little early to say. It seems to be something that is both worthwhile for industry to consider, but it’s also something that it seems like industry is starting to grasp onto.

Russel: Certainly. If you go to AGA and you go to the committee meetings and you participate in the Quality Management Committee, this conversation is coming up. It might be framed a little differently.

Anywhere you hear about somebody talking about PSMS and implementing that within the pipeline operation, that, in effect, is an OMS, I would say there’s really no distinction between PSMS and an OMS. They’re effectively or functionally the same thing.

Where OMS gets more tricky is when I have something where my operation is more than just straightforward pipelining, where 1173 would work and I need to think about, “I want to operate everything the same way.”

The way I want to wrap this conversation up…This is another big takeaway for me. I’ve been preaching this for a while. It’s beginning to resonate. That is, I should not operate my company from the perspective of “This is what I need to do to be compliant, so that I make all my decisions about how I organize operations in order to be compliant.”

What I should be doing is figuring out what is the best way for me to operate and then what are the processes and systems so that compliance isn’t an issue.

Ross: Absolutely. That really resonates. I talk about I’m an Aggie, Texas A&M grad, as you are, but I have a lot of admiration for guys like Nick Saban who preach process, not outcomes.

If you’re doing the right things day in and day out, which OMS is the proper guidance for doing that, then compliance and safety are natural outputs. Focusing on the inputs, trusting the outputs will come out of that.

Russel: Anybody that finds yourself in nested loops, talking about what you need to do to comply for OSHA, PHMSA, EPA, or whatever…You’re in nested loops. You’re struggling because the compliance is not clear. That’s somebody that needs an OMS.

What I need to do is I need to focus on what should I really be doing to operate. Then I need to rationalize my operations approach back so that I can speak to compliance.

Ross: That’s something great that we’re going to chew on for a while to come because you just said a mouthful.

Russel: I know I did.

Ross: [laughs] That’s awesome.

Russel: Anyways, look. Ross, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Focus on the process. [laughs]

Ross: It’s a blessing. Enjoyed it. Thanks so much for having me.

Russel: Thank you. Bye now. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliner’s Podcast and our conversation with Ross.

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. If you’d like to support the podcast, best way to do that is to leave us a review. You can do that on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify, wherever you listen. You can find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

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Russel: If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know, either on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.

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