MOL Group is a leading Central & Eastern European Oil and Gas (O&G) company, with operations in over 30 countries and employing 26,000 people worldwide. MOL Group is vertically integrated throughout the O&G value chain; including upstream extraction and production, midstream transmission and logistics, downstream refining and petrochemical production, and consumer retail. Daily operation involves processing highly reactive substances at extreme temperatures and pressures that create a flammable, explosive and inherently dangerous environment.
Process safety and asset integrity is fundamental to MOL Group, to ensure reliable supply while safeguarding people, the environment and assets. The company routinely conducts several discrete forms of process safety risk assessments on a continuous basis as part of normal business operations, leading to numerous studies every year for a single refinery.
While MOL Group already had good processes in place for risk assessment, they had disjointed and aging systems across geographies to track the outcomes of each risk assessment, such as Excel files on individual hard drives or filed away in desk drawers.
Defining new business processes and tailoring a solution with the Enablon Application
Bringing expertise in technical risk and digital solutions, the ERM team worked closely with key stakeholders across MOL Group to define new business processes and implement a tailored Enablon Risk Management application for a pilot at five Downstream Production facilities in Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia.
One thing emerged on the brink of this project: an unexpected and highly effective partnership between ERM, Enablon and MOL Group. Such level of understanding and empathy is rarely seen in the business world today and reminds us that not everything is about moneymaking. We are making each other become better companies. Looking forward to whatever future adventures are ahead for us.
The process integrates the outputs from operational risk studies within the Enterprise Risk Management framework. Discrete process safety findings and recommendations are mapped to a common risk operational risk register and evaluated based on a single 5x5 risk matrix for all production units at each refinery. The risk register is then elevated through the Enterprise Risk Management framework to aggregate process safety risks at both a site and enterprise level. Actions can be raised against discrete risk assessment findings or recommendations and prioritized according to the anticipated level of risk reduction allowing MOL to allocate budget and prioritize actions informed by risk-based insight.
Results and recognition
As a result of the new system and process, MOL have near-live visibility of their entire enterprise-wide operational risk and full traceability of risk levels and actions throughout the organisation. What’s more, the dynamic and scalable framework also allows MOL to extend the remit of this truly holistic risk management process into the future with new sites, new inputs and across enterprise risk categories.
The project broke new ground by pushing the limits of the Enablon system and challenging MOL to rethink their existing approach to risk by elevating their organisational processes and practices to the next level. As a result of the innovation, the project and final solution has received external recognition:
- Recipient of 2019 Excellence in Technology Innovation Award from Enablon presented at the Sustainable Business Forum in Paris (June 2019)
- Finalist, runner-up for EHS Innovation Award at Verdantix Summit in Atlanta (September 2019)
- Project presented at the AIChE “2019 European Conference on Process Safety and Big Data” in Frankfurt (October 2019)
