Aramco drives continuous improvement in safety

In its latest Sustainability Report, Aramco highlights its focus on safety as a core value throughout its global operations, where its “total workforce concept” is built on a robust safety culture and safe environment across its employees, contractors, and suppliers

This is complemented by innovative digital solutions that drive safety performance, elevate emergency readiness, and enhance safety governance.

A key factor in maintaining high safety standards is Aramco's monthly Executive Management Safety Review program, which it has run for over 40 years. This involves a management team visiting one of the company’s major operational areas to review HSE performance and engage directly with employees and contractors to discuss safety matters.

Aramco reports that its Total Recordable Case (TRC) rate has decreased by 22% since 2021, which it attributes to its investment in training initiatives and implementing a comprehensive lessons learned programme to prevent incidents re-occuring. All incidents are evaluated to identify root causes, following which corrective actions are introduced and lessons learned shared with all relevant departments and stakeholders.

The NOC has expanded its corporate safety assessment programmes, which assess all Aramco organisations against its robust Safety Management System (SMS) guidelines, to include in-kingdom and international affiliates, with more than 50 SMS assessments performed in 2023. supporting the reinforcement of their safety management system and providing the necessary resources,training, and guidance to improve and continually enhance their safety performance.

Ensuring contractor safety

One of the enduring challenges for major companies in Saudi Arabia is ensuring high and consistent standards across multicultural contractor workforces, where there may be variations in safety culture and behaviour as well as disparities in levels of competence. Ensuring contractor safety is a strong focus for Aramco, which partners with its contractors to build a strong safety culture across the value chain, with bespoke tools used to monitor contractor safety performance and compliance to corporate safety requirements. Along with its contractor safety index and turnaround safety index Aramco has introduced the Rig Safety Index, which monitors onshore and offshore drilling rig contractor safety performance. Another recent initiative has been the introduction of the ‘Line of Fire’ campaign to address risks associated with danger zones at construction sites. This aimed to raise the safety awareness of the contractor site workforce, improving their capabilities to identify work site hazards and enhancing safe behaviour.

In terms of emergency preparedness, Aramco’s Corporate Emergency Management Taskforce ensures resilience and readiness pre-planning, as well as risk based, and site-specific emergency response plans. A quarterly forum for emergency preparedness coordinators is held to continually improve emergency readiness, and the company has recently enhanced its digital safety system – SafeLife – to enable a company-wide tracking of emergency exercise schedules, as well as drill critique items until closure in a unified system.

The energy giant has also expanded safety training programmes, working closely with five National Training Centers (NTCs) to evaluate and enhance existing Safety Diploma Programs and to establish new ones.

With its focus on safety as a core value and the introduction of new methodologies, initiatives and technologies, Aramco ensures that it drives a culture of continuous improvement in health and safety across its global operations.