Tolerance: why is it needed and why is electronic better than paper

    Hello!

    My name is Igor Gromov, and I work in SIBUR in the function "Digital Technologies", in the direction of digitalization of processes. Now we are actively engaged in the conversion to electronic form of our work orders.

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    The admission order is an instruction on safety measures that is issued to personnel for conducting hazardous work at industrial facilities. Such works include work at heights, earthmoving, fire and gas hazardous work. Fire and gas hazardous at SIBUR enterprises account for the largest share of all high-risk work. Fire is dangerous because during their holding there is a possibility of heating the structure or tool, and it is necessary to take safety measures against fire and burns. During gas hazardous work, gases may be emitted from containers or pipelines, some of them are explosive and may cause poisoning.

    To avoid injuries and accidents, a clearance order is created. It describes in detail what safety measures should be observed during each type of such work - for example, it is necessary to wear a helmet, cover your eyes with a protective mask, and check the air at the work site for the maximum permissible concentration of hydrocarbons.

    In this post I will tell you why it is important to digitalize a huge document flow associated with work orders.

    SIBUR is tens of thousands of pieces of sophisticated equipment that are constantly in need of repair. Here, as with a personal car - you know that after 10-15 thousand kilometers you need to change the oil, then eventually - pads and more. And we have many pumps, compressors, heat exchangers and other complex iron. Each unit has a planned operating time without a break for repairs or maintenance. During many repairs, not work without increased danger. Therefore, there are a lot of work permits within the framework of one enterprise during the year - the bill goes to thousands, and in some places tens of thousands.

    As a result, production engineers draw up a huge number of documents (by law, each admission order is made in 2 copies). For your understanding, a pile of paper a meter high is formed at the SIBUR Tobolsk plant per day.

    Of course, saving paper and the topic of sustainability is important. But we are not the only one here, there are other important reasons to digitalize work orders.

    Data


    Each admission order contains a lot of useful information, not only for the personnel conducting the repair, but also for analytics - the composition of the team, the place of work, time. Sometimes it happens that some work is carried out by a team of 3 people, somewhere it’s already required 5-7, somewhere in general 10. All of these data, if collected and analyzed, can be useful in planning the next work similar to the regulations.

    To collect and normally evaluate such data in the previous process is to dig in the paper with your head, write it out manually in some kind of tablet and try to work with it. On the scale of SIBUR, such an approach is difficult to make effective.

    Work on work permits is regulated by federal law - “Rules for the safe conduct of fire, gas hazardous and repair work”, according to which work permit must be stored for 30 days. This is necessary in the event that an emergency situation occurs during repair that causes damage to the employee. Then the supervisory authorities will have 30 days to come and carry out an inspection, including data from the permit.

    Since 2017, normative legal acts allow the execution of an admission order for the execution of gas hazardous, fire and repair work in electronic form, instead of an admission order drawn up on paper. When working with an electronic form, we also need to focus on the federal law “On electronic signatures”.

    How did it go


    A workflow with an admission order consists of the following steps:

    • Form a clearance outfit.
    • Coordinate the clearance order.
    • Approve outfit clearance.
    • Follow safety measures during its preparation and report it.
    • Perform safety measures when directly conducting outfits.

    It looks simple. In fact, in terms of digitalization and improving business processes, there is an abyss of opportunities inside. So far, we have begun to work at the first level, which is dedicated to the formation of clearance orders.

    The main task that we solve at this stage is to save the participants in the process from the need for compelled creativity. Before, engineers had to introduce a list of necessary security measures at the stages of preparation and conduct of work, keep all this in mind or edit word templates, remember where and what security measures we have. A person in such conditions can miss something or vice versa - play it safe and enter too much. In each of the divisions, dozens of clearance orders must be filled out daily; people just might get tired.

    What we have now


    We have created a database for the first stage, which are correlated with each type of work and with units of equipment on which these works should be carried out. In the database there is a list of all equipment, and technological maps, and security measures. Using a simple interface and a database, the employee selects the necessary conditions and forms an admission outfit. Everything about everything now takes one or two minutes, and the output is a finished document that can already be used.

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    The second important step was the issue of navigation - in the work permit, you must also indicate the place of work during hot work. A person should know exactly where to carry out work, where are fire extinguishing equipment and the like. We also simplified this by taking schemes from technological regulations. We wrote a simple browser-based image editor that allows a person to quickly put the necessary marks on the diagram and get a ready-made map for specific work.

    Previously, employees had to parse folders in a heap, look for schemes there, draw layouts in Visio, circle the necessary objects. Now you just get a scheme of the place of work and note everything important.

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    As a result, we reduced the time for the formation of the order by 5 times.
    Sounds cool, but it's not an end in itself. In our case, this is 2 minutes now versus 10 minutes before. But if you sit down and translate this effect into real money for the enterprise, the effect will not be very large. And if you even bring these figures to the cost of maintaining your own development unit for this purpose (reducing the time it takes to form an order), the economy is unlikely to converge.

    The main thing that was achieved was to reduce the loss of time of working brigades that carry out work on tolerance orders.

    Each clearance clearance order is always time. And before we started, this time was 1.5-2 hours. That is, a team of 10 people fully equipped could sit for a couple of hours and wait until the clearance order passed all the bureaucratic steps and it was possible to go to work. Let me remind you that there are tens of thousands of outfits. And if you already transfer such temporary losses due to downtime to money - it’s tens of millions of rubles a year.

    Second phase


    The next important point will be the full implementation of electronic signature in the product. Now, to obtain a signature on a dress and its approval, one has to travel a lot around the plant. You need to take the outfit, get to the head of the unit, so he put the signature. And he has many other things besides signing, and he may not be in place, which means that he must wait until he returns from the meeting and signs.

    Therefore, we completely translate this into electronic format so that the person who has formed the clearance order on the web simply sends it for approval in electronic form. There they will receive it, sign it and coordinate it remotely.

    Here 63-ФЗ on digital signature is a good help, one of the types of which is a simple electronic signature. On a corporate scale, to make it easier to understand, an electronic signature is a pair of "Login Password" in the corporate system. If a person is logged in, it is considered that all the documents that he sends from his account to colleagues are signed with a simple electronic signature.

    A simple electronic signature meets the requirements of supervisory authorities and, in comparison with a strengthened electronic signature, is easily scalable. There is no need for certification centers, enhanced signatures, tokens and certificates.

    The main difficulty with a simple electronic signature is that not all employees have accounts in information systems. Mechanics who are directly involved in repairs do not need a working computer. Now we are designing a system that will allow us to collect simple electronic signatures from people without the usual accounts. I will talk about the solution when it is ready.

    Important about infrastructure and development practices


    To get a product that works in a working environment, a great team of designers and developers is not enough. Yes, now the industry has many tools that allow you to create quick prototypes and collect feedback from users. But our experience shows that there is an impressive distance between the prototype that everyone likes and the really working product that everyone is ready to use. And at this distance is the development of infrastructure, the formation and construction of those processes that should fit into it.

    A couple of years ago, German Oskarovich Gref lamented the fact that Sberbank units are slowly rolling out software updates, compared to companies in Silicon Valley. Sberbank then entered the phase of building DevOps ...

    At the very beginning, the situation with the speed of occurrence of changes in the working environment was unbearable - neither hardware, nor experts on DevOps practices, nor software, which was already agreed with colleagues from information security. Of the 12 months, we spent about 70% of the time building the process of continuous integration (CI), and we will get to continuous delivery (CD) in the next couple of months. We have a designer, 6 developers, a scrum master and a product owner in our team, and we are also looking for a QA specialist. While I like the way it turns out, especially the realization that a software development system that is starting to produce results has appeared in such a conservative environment as the petrochemical industry.

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