Prism Apps - HURDLE

A complete turnaround in risk management

The oil and gas industry's long-term success depends on the cost-effective discovery, acquisition and development of new reserves. Not surprisingly, proactive risk management plays a huge part in these efforts.

BACKGROUND

Historically, this has been done using spreadsheets, which can be problematic: often you'd find a number of versions of each document in use at once; updating and cross-referencing spreadsheets was time consuming and costly; plus, these documents can easily be corrupted or even accidentally deleted.

That's where Aberdeen-based Prism Apps' cloud-based HURDLE system comes in.

Back in 2016, Codify started working with Prism Apps to create HURDLE: custom software that not only makes the whole risk management process easier, clearer and more efficient, but also helps businesses better manage and control actions and issues internally.

In short, it helps improve organisations' decision making.

And while, at the moment, it's primarily used in oil and gas, it could easily be adopted across a range of moderate to high risk industries.

APPROACH

The brief was to create something that was easier to use than anything else on the market; something customers could manage themselves - and could be configured to their needs: breaking down project and HSE risks into specific themes while categorising them into levels of severity.

This was one of the first systems we built using the Aurelia Framework and we decided to host the app in Microsoft Azure, bringing benefits such as scalability: the ability for the system to easily adapt to manage increased - or decreased - demand, with the client only paying for what they use.

Other advantages include 99.9% guaranteed uptime and automatic data back-ups as well as built-in data recovery.

Aurelia is a lightweight and fast framework that meant we could build a responsive web application that worked on both desktop and tablets.

With this system, we started by creating mock-ups so Prism Apps could visualise it. During the build itself, we made sure all the requirements were recorded and included, and of course the customer spent a lot of time onsite working with our team.

We took an iterative approach: releasing interim versions and deploying them to Azure, each time learning from the previous one. This meant Prism Apps could see progress on the application and test the system, while also being able to demonstrate HURDLE to its customers.

Now, the HURDLE system is split into three products

• HURDLE - risk management system
• RELAY - an action management system to help organisations manage and control actions and issues
• HURDLEpro - combines HURDLE and RELAY as a risk and action management system

And benefits of the system include

• Informative and easy-to-read dashboards
• Simple to use with no training requirement
• Fully auditable and compliant with ISO 31000
• RELAY and HURDLEpro send automated email action reminders, while
  data is easily printed or exported
• Easily accessed from anywhere with an internet connection
• Able to be configured to a business's own risk matrix

Andy Sutherland, Director and Principal Consultant from Prism Apps said: "I'm not surprised we ended up with a brilliant finished product hosted on a great system.

"The team at Codify was knowledgeable and easy to deal with; we had an excellent development engineer and - importantly - the company was accurate with its cost estimates and schedules.

"And the story didn't end when the development piece was done and dusted, instead we've continued to benefit from the ongoing support of the Codify team in Aberdeen."