Managing Equipment Stockpiles for Oil Spill Response: 5 Challenges & How to Solve Them

Maintaining on-site oil spill response equipment during oil and gas exploration programs is becoming a standard requirement around the world. As oil exploration expands into remote geographical locations, companies face conditions where the emergency response infrastructure is often limited or nonexistent. Here are some of the challenges we’ve identified associated with this.

1. Managing Multiple Locations

Many organizations dealing with oil spills face the challenge of managing equipment across multiple locations. These organizations need to know equipment supply levels, conditions, and availability instantly when a spill occurs. The difficulty in tracking this however is that the equipment also needs to be stored in a very specific way to ensure an efficient response. Equipment is stored in a ready-to-use state and can be packaged in bags or boxes preloaded on trucks or containers.

D4H Equipment Management is a cloud-based equipment tracking platform with a built-in global equipment visualization interface that allows you to browse your equipment by map to get a geographical sense of where the nearest asset for a job is located. At a glance from the map view, you can view your equipment’s operational status, and browse by category and kind.

2. Tracking Maintenance

Organizations have contingency plans in place to coordinate the response to an oil spill. The plan brings together the various elements of the response and it should be kept up to date and tested on a regular basis. This plan relies on the fact that equipment is satisfactory, has maintenance schedules and recorded history. Many companies have assigned staff who have sole responsibility for equipment inspection and ensuring equipment is in a constant state of readiness at each of their stockpiles.

Tracking expensive response equipment on a spreadsheet or paper-based system can be an extremely labor-intensive task. D4H Equipment Management is designed to remove the administrative burden associated with tracking maintenance schedules. The platform will proactively alert staff in advance of any upcoming inspections, services, and expirations.

3. Scheduling Repairs

In order for organizations to respond effectively, there needs to be infrastructure that enables them to track and conduct their own repairs as part of a response. When dealing with large stockpiles of equipment across a number of locations companies can find that the process of scheduling repairs and monitoring work can turn into a complex undertaking if they’re not prepared.

D4H will automatically alert you on your dashboard and remind you by email if an inspection is overdue, repair has been assigned, or an item as expired. You can easily create repair requests and assign them to individuals. Once the repair has been completed, you will receive a notification and can look up past repair records for any item.

4. Ensuring Equipment Suitability

Companies will ensure that there are robust management structures to lead a response to an oil spill. Response team members will be aware of their individual roles and responsibilities and trained in oil spill response. To complement this preparedness it is essential to ensure that the equipment held is relevant to the oil types handled in each stockpile’s geographical area and that this equipment has the capacity to provide a sufficient response. The difficulty is ensuring that product specifications are readily available to response personnel. Ensuring the correct product is used when in a response scenario.

Equipment and resource typing are key components for describing an inventory. D4H allows you to create categories and kinds of equipment to describe the jobs they get done and get accurate visualization of your response capabilities.

5.Tracking of Equipment Shipping

Organizations often have to move their stockpiles with little notice. This can be for a number of reasons, for instance, exploration may have ceased in a region or they need additional equipment to support a response elsewhere. Often there will be a detailed plan in place so that equipment will be successfully and rapidly deployed. However, due to the pace at which the redeployment is happening, the tracking of the equipment being relocated from one location to another can be neglected and difficult to manage using paper-based or spreadsheet methods.

D4H Equipment Management allows you to quickly and easily update your equipment’s location, or deploy it to a member of personnel. A full audit log will track every change made to each item of equipment.

How Resolve Marine Group Ensures Total Equipment Readiness for Global Marine Response

Leading marine services organization, Resolve Marine Group, provides marine salvage, emergency response, marine firefighting, wreck removal, maritime training, and many other services supporting the global maritime industry. They use D4H Equipment Management to ensure a constant state of equipment readiness for any number of salvage and emergency response scenarios. Read the full case study here.