Streamlining secure access to the most current Internal Standards
Sasol, a major player in the petrochemical industry, employs nearly 20,000 personnel across facilities in South Africa, China, Italy, Spain, the UK, the US, and Qatar. With an extensive engineering department that includes 1,800 engineering professionals across multiple disciplines, Sasol faces complex challenges. Partnering with engineering contractors and hundreds of companies within Sasol’s supply chain, leaders sought an efficient, up-to-date system for engineers to collaborate, share crucial documents, and assess updates to standards relevant to their projects. While Sasol has been an avid user of Engineering Workbench for over 25 years and has streamlined access to external content like API and ASME standards, they needed an optimized, secure way to share their internal company standards with suppliers and contractors to hasten project schedules and track content usage. To achieve this, they implemented Accuris’ Internal Standards Solutions (ISS) in 2020, yielding profound and far-reaching results.
The Problem
To ensure effective collaboration with suppliers and comply with South African maintenance regulations, Sasol must share all relevant internal company standards with its suppliers and contractors during onboarding. Before implementing Internal Standards Solutions, Sasol distributed these standards packages via CDs, relying on courier services to hand-deliver the CDs. There were several issues with this method of collaboration – for instance:
- CD deliveries frequently experienced significant delays, sometimes taking weeks or even months to reach the recipient, thereby causing project delays. In one instance, a CD took as long as 18 months to reach its destination in a remote area.
- The standards on the CDs contained static pdf versions of the standards in use at the time. Consequently, if any updates were made to these standards, Sasol’s contractors and suppliers would not have access to the most current versions.
- Projects often involve both Sasol’s internal engineers and external contracted engineers, yet there was no shared platform for collaboration on internal standards development. Sasol engineers would use SharePoint, while external engineers relied on the CD versions of standards. This disjointed approach led to frustration, redundancy, miscommunication, delays, and errors.
- Both Sasol’s internal engineers and external partners needed to address technical questions related to standards and specs. Answering a query like “Is this pump size suitable for this application?” required a formal process: filling out a Technical Query form, sending it to document control, then to a subject matter expert who would answer the question and send it back to document control, and finally back to the requester. On average, each Technical Query took 2 weeks to process, with 1-2 queries submitted daily, averaging around 500 queries/year. These queries could lead to delays impacting project timelines, especially if engineers had multiple inquiries about project standards or requirements related to their project.
- Sasol engineers and external teams would manually research citations and references within the company standards. When reviewing PDFs or hard copies of Sasol Standards, they’d encounter a citation or reference and need to understand its relevance. To do so, the engineer would search for the referenced standard, find it, and read through that standard to ding the related content. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors, especially if using incorrect or outdated versions of the standards.
- Suppliers would upload content from the CD to their systems, hosting Sasol content on their private document management systems, which may lack guaranteed security measures.
- Sasol lacked visibility into how suppliers utilized content, hindering traceability on their part. Absence of traceability prevents an organization from obtaining quality certification (ISO 9001) for their processes.
- Without visibility into content usage, Sasol cannot substantiate misuse of standards in arbitration proceedings, whether by suppliers or third parties. Without visibility into standards usage, monitoring inconsistencies in engineering work becomes very difficult. With numerous suppliers operating under various company policies and processes, Sasol required a tool to empower these supplier teams and ensure consistent work.
The Solution
Sasol turned to Internal Standards Solutions from Accuris.
Internal Standards Solutions offers a secure platform tailored for accessing, understanding, implementing, and sharing internal company standards within your organization and among external partners. The integration of ISS with Engineering Workbench created a robust digital environment where internal and external teams could access and share the latest company standards and documentation. This system provided tools for real-time collaboration, such as project folders that both Sasol engineers and contractors could access, ensuring that everyone involved had the most current information and could communicate changes efficiently.
The Results
Sasol first deployed ISS to its suppliers, observing a significant increase in productivity. Witnessing the success of ISS adoption among suppliers, Sasol extended the rollout to its internal engineers. Compared to the previous tool, which offered less than 10% of ISS’s functionality, the adoption of ISS among both suppliers and Sasol engineers led to a substantial boost in productivity. For instance:
- Immediate access to updated standards globally, eliminating the lengthy delays associated with CD distribution.
- External engineers now have access to the most current content, receiving automated notifications when standards related to their projects are updated or revised.
- Internal Sasol engineers and external engineers can now share access to the same Project Folder, containing project-relevant documents and enabling easy collaboration. They also have tools for annotating, commenting, linking to specific content, and sharing information seamlessly.
- A drastic reduction in personnel needed for distributing standards, from five full-time employees to just one, thanks to the tools and access provided by ISS and Engineering Workbench.
- Near-instant resolution of technical queries thanks to AI-enhanced search capabilities, reducing response times from weeks to minutes. Following the setup of ISS, suppliers and contractors could log in, complete training, and begin utilizing the product in under 10 minutes – a significant improvement compared to waiting weeks or months for their content to arrive on a CD. Sasol witnessed nearly 100% adoption among its suppliers and contractors, and were able to continue their work in a changing world.
- The cumbersome process of handling Technical Queries became more efficient with the introduction of AI-powered search capabilities, known as “Research Assistant,” powering the ISS and EWB search engine. Users now simply input their query and instantly retrieve the answer. This advanced search functionality within ISS and EWB surpasses conventional keyword searches, including those on Google, due to its natural language processing, semantic search capabilities, and AI trained on the world’s largest library of engineering content. The 2-week cycles of hundreds of Technical Queries per year have been reduced to 2-minute searches in ISS and EWB – significantly improving project schedules and enabling engineers to focus on their core responsibilities.
- Engineers now benefit from instant understanding of citations and references within Sasol standards and SDO standards, courtesy of the Dynamic Linking feature in ISS and EWB. Citations within standards are hyperlinked to the referenced standards, allowing users to read auto-generated summaries when hovering over the link, or visit the referenced standard at the citation point if they click on the link. These links remain updated as standards are revised, ensuring engineers have the most current information readily available.
- Enhanced security and traceability of document access and usage, vital for maintaining ISO 9001 certification standards.
Fully Integrated Functionality
Powerful search capabilities. Intuitive collaboration tools. Up-to-date, relevant content.
Sasol’s adoption of Internal Standards Solutions within the Engineering Workbench platform has set a new standard in engineering operations. By streamlining collaboration, enhancing document security, and leveraging cutting-edge AI technology, Sasol not only improved productivity but also positioned itself as a leader in technological adoption in the petrochemical industry.