Championing Safety in Oil and Gas

00:00:02 Eric Harp
This episode of the Energy Pipeline is.                  

00:00:04 Russell Stewart
Sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and gas. Since the 1930s, Caterpillar has manufactured engines for drilling, production, well service and gas compression. 

00:00:15 Eric Harp
With more than 2100 dealer locations worldwide. 

00:00:19 Russell Stewart
Caterpillar offers customers a dedicated support team to assist with their premier power solutions. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast with your host, Casey Yost. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry. Whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your knowledge transfer hub. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline. Hey, everybody. As always, thanks for listening. Today I'm very excited to introduce as guest on the show Eric Harp. Eric is the general manager for Mathena product line, SPM Oil and Gas, which is a Caterpillar company. Eric, thanks for coming on the show today. 

00:01:13 Eric Harp
Hey, thank you, Russell, for having me on the show. I've enjoyed your HSE podcast, the great talent and the guests you've had on this show. So it's an honor for me to be here today. 

00:01:22 Russell Stewart
Well, I appreciate that. I really do. Eric, let's start off by talking a little bit about you. I'm talking to you from where right now? 

00:01:35 Eric Harp
Well, I'm out of El Reno, Oklahoma, just outside Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 

00:01:39 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right. And you an Oklahoma boy? 

00:01:44 Eric Harp
I am, yeah. I'm descendant of the Land Land Runners, and so my family still has the farm in Oklahoma that we were in the land Run of 1889. And so, yeah, I've been born in Bread, Oklahoma. 

00:02:00 Russell Stewart
So you're a Sooner. 

00:02:02 Eric Harp
No, I'm not a Sooner. 

00:02:04 Russell Stewart
Not a Sooner. 

00:02:06 Eric Harp
I graduated from the other university and so hopefully my family did it right, did it by the rules and didn't get there too soon. 

00:02:15 Russell Stewart
Which university did you say you went to? 

00:02:17 Eric Harp
Oklahoma State University. 

00:02:19 Russell Stewart
Okay, so you're. You're not. Oh, well, that was. Now, a lot of people who are listening won't understand this, but. But I. I insulted him by. By asking him if he was a Sooner in more ways than one. The. The one way he referred to just. Just then. If those of you know how that know the history on that, but if he's an Oklahoma State cowboy, to ask him if he's a Sooner, that was. That was like a. A double insult there, you know? So I apologize right off the bat, Eric. See, I, you know, that's. That's why I'm not a lawyer. I ask questions I don't know the answers to, you know, and then I get in trouble as a result. 

00:03:00 Eric Harp
Oil and Gas. We've got, we've got great talent from all these universities, whether or not we have the same colors or not. But man, there's been some work, some great people from ou, from, from A and M, from all these different great schools that have impacted oil and gas. 

00:03:14 Russell Stewart
So yeah, orange. 

00:03:16 Eric Harp
And whether we win or lose, yeah. 

00:03:19 Russell Stewart
It'S just a friendly rivalry and it's a joke that we all enjoy. But you mentioned that your family are farmers. How'd you get in the oil and gas business? 

00:03:35 Eric Harp
Yeah, through a connection. A friend of mine was working with a small company here in Oklahoma, a small family company called Mathena Incorporated. And they're looking for someone to help out in processes and some business management. So I was able to come over and that's been about 19 years ago, so I can't believe it's been, it's been close to 20 years now working oil and gas with, with this Mathena product line. 

00:04:01 Russell Stewart
Okay, so I said you're the general manager for the Mathena product line, which is a part of SPM Oil and Gas, a Caterpillar company. That's a mouthful there. Where do we start? Yeah, I guess let's talk about this Mathena product line maybe. 

00:04:21 Eric Harp
Yeah. So Mathena product line, like I mentioned earlier, I came back when the Shell revolution was happening in the early 2000s. Came to work for Mathena, a little privately held company. They were then acquired by Weir Oil and Gas out of Scotland and then we're subsequently sold it again to Caterpillar. And so Caterpillar bought the SPM product line, the pumps for fracking. And part of the acquisition, Mathena came along with that. So now we're umbrella under the SPM Oil and Gas, which is a company of Caterpillar. And in our company within Mathena, we provide surface control and well control solutions for EMP operators across the us so we supply hydraulic chokes and igniters and mud gas separators and, and manage pressure drilling chokes and basically anything that's in that surface control well control space for drilling and production operations. 

00:05:18 Russell Stewart
Okay, well, and that's really impressive. You're a provider of all this surface control and equipment. And I guess you rent this equipment out on the drill pad. Do you guys manufacture it? Yeah, we do. 

00:05:43 Eric Harp
We build the equipment, you know, the operations and well control. Right. It's a safety function, effectively ensuring that the rig is able to handle well control events. And so we make sure that that equipment is validated and verified and it's gone through that it's ready to perform when they need it. And so then our technicians will deliver it to location, we'll install it to the right standards we need to. To be at, and then just very support that equipment while it's being used in the field. And then when the operator is finished with it at the end of the well, we'll come collect it, you know, clean it, ensure that it's ready to go for the next application. 

00:06:19 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right, I got you. All right, well, Cat wanted to have you on. On the. The podcast, not so much to talk about all the various different equipment and whatnot, although I would find that an interesting conversation. But the thing that's near and dear to my heart, you guys have quite the commitment to safety, right? 

00:06:43 Eric Harp
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Caterpillar is a. Is a company that takes safety very seriously. It's embedded in the culture, and so much so, you know, we've, as a smaller organization within Caterpillar, as we're trying to adjust our company culture to Caterpillar's culture or try to improve our own, there's a big emphasis on safety. And so Caterpillar's got these great tools, these great systems within their organization that helps you develop your own safety culture. 

00:07:11 Russell Stewart
Okay, so you said you got about 20 years experience in oil and gas. Safety's changed a little bit in the oil field over the past 20 years, hasn't it? 

00:07:23 Eric Harp
I would argue that, yeah. I mean, just from my perspective, I remember the days, you know, when actually people would say safety first, but you would never see that. You'd always see the job would come first, and if we can do it safely, we will. And so, you know, a little bit of a lack of, you know, lack of concern and definitely lack of experience. But, yeah, I think we've seen a big shift. I mean, as I'm just talking through this, you think about podcasts like this. Like this wasn't around 20 years ago, and there's been some great books on oil field safety, and I do believe that the industry is becoming a little bit more safety conscious, and it's definitely becoming a lot more aware of how do we get people home safely every day. So it's impressive, and it's good to be part of that. 

00:08:07 Russell Stewart
Well, and I wanted to, of course, emphasize that, but at oggn, we're, of course, huge advocates for the oil and gas industry, and we always take every opportunity we can to point out positive aspects like that. As we just said about safety, I argue that the same thing is true about when you say hse. So you're Talking health, safety and the environment. I would say the same thing is true with the H and the E in this hse. Been a lot of improvement in concern for workers health, which goes along with safety and then complete culture change, I think with regard to environmental, just like you talked about. And I think that's all positive for the industry. And I'm glad to hear that. Let's dive into SPM Mathena's safety journey. You guys kind of started something rather serious over the last two years, right? 

00:09:19 Eric Harp
Yeah. So part of being a business within the Caterpillar system, Caterpillar has access to a lot of different tools and a lot of different, different things that they do. They have a group called the Caterpillar Safety Services and it's a little independent team that goes around and helps champion safety or helps look at its safety aspects of your organization. And so they came in and did an assessment of our Mathena group. And part of that assessment is they conduct a full survey. And so yeah, we took that survey and then we developed some action plans and then got some results back again from two years of doing this process. And we just had some recent great results last fall. And that's, you know, get to share that with a lot of people today about how we've made that journey. 

00:10:08 Russell Stewart
Okay, so you had a safety assessment or survey. You said, what was that and how did that work? 

00:10:21 Eric Harp
So we take all of the people in the organization, all the technicians, everyone in the organization filled out. It was a survey conducted by this group. And you basically report up about how do you interact with the person directly above you, the person who you report to. And so they would ask, they'd ask some great questions, right? Asking questions like does your supervisor ever ask you to do an unsafe task or do you believe your supervisor cares about your safety? And so the results of this survey gives you some really honest feedback about how does your team perceive safety within your organization. And so it's a pretty good mirror to understand how does my team compare with other teams within Caterpillar with other teams outside of Caterpillar? And how do you score from an overall safety culture, Just a safety culture, what would be your score number? So having, having those results are a little bit eye opening. 

00:11:20 Russell Stewart
Okay, so each field and maintenance technician was asked to fill out this survey and the idea was to give honest feedback. What were some of the highlights that resulted from that? 

00:11:35 Eric Harp
Well, we got the first year, we got some really eye opening data that made us go back and really reevaluate our relationships and really understand what's happening from our group and why we're not getting the safety message across. And so that CAD safety group, they help enact a lot of different leadership techniques and you put together this action plan. And so the results we got of the second year, we've made some great progress and in fact, something that we, you know, a little bit pat ourselves on the back, but we had 100% of our teammates believe that the organization actively encouraged safe work progress practices. So that was a little bit of an eye opening for us to show that, hey, we're actually getting the message out to the group that they understand that we are trying to ensure they have safe work practices. And we had high percentage of our people felt that, hey, the management does feel safety is important. And we had a high percentage of people said that they do participate in developing safe work practices. So yeah, we were really excited about the feedback we got from our group after the second year of implementing some of the changes we made. 

00:12:43 Russell Stewart
Okay, so this was in the second year. So 100% of employees believed that the organization actively encouraged safe work practices. You said a high percentage felt that management considered safety important and the employees were now participating in developing safe work practices. In fact, Caterpillar gave me the stats. It was 98%. So yeah, you're right, it was. But that's in the second year. You didn't, you didn't have those high statistics in the first year, correct? 

00:13:13 Eric Harp
No, no, the first year, yeah, we, we got less than favorable results. Right? We, we, we did. Definitely shows areas we needed to work on. For instance, we had, you know, managers, some of the technicians felt like their manager should be out on the front lines a little bit more with them, helping them interact. And, and then we got some results back that we found the technicians were probably taking on, you know, a little bit more risk than we're comfortable with. So understanding and unpacking some of that with the technicians was some good learning for us. 

00:13:43 Russell Stewart
That's great because you asked, I mean, you just asked or the survey asked some very blunt questions like has your supervisor ever asked you to do an unsafe task? Or do you believe your supervisor cares about your safety? And some of the results of that in the first year were, as you said, eye opening. But you guys turned it around and that's what I wanted to talk about. So how did you, how did, what were these areas of improvement and how did you address them? 

00:14:18 Eric Harp
Yeah, and, and yeah, I, I say, I appreciate that you said we turned it around. I'm a little leery. Right. As soon as you start thinking, well, we've, we've, we've made it, you take it off the ball, made some impact on our operations, that we're getting some better results now than we were. And a lot of that goes back to just engagement, ensuring that we are, in fact, staying in front of the technicians. We are working with them, having much better conversations in the past, having better recognition of those technicians when they do things safely. And then the other element that Caterpillar is working on right now is we're embracing these hot principles. And so moving from some of the old, the old methods of how you view safety into a new human organizational performance process is definitely beginning to make changes in our system. 

00:15:06 Russell Stewart
That's human organizational performance. We talk about that a lot on the HSE show. That's having a huge impact in the oil and gas industry. In fact, a lot of people don't know, actually the oil and gas industry is, among other industries, is one of the leaders in that. Of course, you know, it's always been in the aviation industry and also the nuclear industry. But the oil and gas industry is right up there when it comes to human organizational performance. I'm glad that you said what you said. We repeat this often when it comes to safety. If you ever feel like you've arrived, that's when you're in. That's when you're in trouble. You've got to always keep, you've got to always keep learning. You've got to always keep moving forward. And so I think what CAT has, what they call their rapid improvement workshop. Is that right? 

00:16:06 Eric Harp
Yeah, that's another element, another thing that we worked on and we bring in a group that comes in and instead of just, you know, getting all your experts in one room and you think, well, we're just going to solve the problem. We actually bring in our field service technicians and we bring in shop maintenance technicians, guys that actually turn the wrench. The guys actually perform the service in the field. And we go through and we, we look at a process. We actually, you know, do a mock installation in our yard and we observe it and take notes and watch where, where these guys are telling us where they see risk. And, and then based on that, we break down that process into different elements and you have to do with a little bit of an open mind. But like the G.K. chesterton quote, you don't have your mind so open that your brains fall out. 

00:16:54 Russell Stewart
And so, folks, that's worth the price of admission right there today. 

00:17:00 Eric Harp
Yeah. So you have to have an open mind. But you know, and I was a little bit skeptical thinking, hey, this process is, you know, we've been doing the same process for 25 years. I don't think we're going to see much change. But you know, it's amazing when you get guys that actually do the work day in, day out and they actually pause for a second and take a look and say, hey, this right here is kind of risky for me in the field. That's where we made notes and we were able to come up with a couple solutions that I'm really proud of our group on. 

00:17:27 Russell Stewart
And so what were those solutions? 

00:17:30 Eric Harp
Well, we had three big ones. You know, the process is really designed to look at and identify PSIFs or SIFs. And in this case, not only did we make some progress on that, but we also eliminated some finger smashes and some non SIF related stuff. So we developed a new spud tool that's in revision number three right now, still in pilot phase. And so we'll be rolling that out more this year. That keeps technicians hands from out of the flanges. And so we're proud of that. We developed a new cradle system for our trailers as we load and unload this equipment to locations. And so that's rolling out now as well. And then we also made some new process changes on how we install some of these flares on locations and the way that those are oriented as we install those. So yeah, the group getting this feedback was some really great, really proud of the team that actually had some really good, some good input on how to make the process safer. 

00:18:26 Russell Stewart
So how did you prioritize these things and what kind of challenges did you face in implementing the changes? 

00:18:38 Eric Harp
Yeah, so the way we prioritized it, we really just took the technicians that were doing the work and the group just said, where do we really see a place where a sift can happen or something significant can go wrong here? And so that's where we really focused our effort and try to reduce it down to some of the top two or three things we could execute as a business. And I, you know, from my perspective, doing this for a while, it's really easy to come up with a solution and you can put it into an sop. And then as you get feedback from the technicians and they do this in these rapid improvement workshops, you get some really honest feedback and say, well, we really don't do this in the field. And you have to understand, well, why, why aren't they doing that? And by getting feedback from technicians and letting them show you, okay, this is the way we can do it safely. And that's part of the HA principles, is that we're taking activities that they've actually developed, and we have a much better chance of getting that deployed in the field and much better buy in the field. Whenever a technician has actually developed some of their own solutions to make it safe. 

00:19:42 Russell Stewart
That'S actually a great point. You build it from, so to say, grassroots up instead of having people from on high come and say, thou shalt this or thou shalt not do this. That's a much better way to get buy in. Let them generate the solutions, and then you got a much better shot at ensuring that those solutions are going to be utilized like you. Like you intended them to be. 

00:20:12 Eric Harp
Yeah. And then, you know, like you mentioned earlier, the fact that we've got some new tools, we've got some new solutions, super proud of that. And, and we've got some great safety results. And yeah, I'm really proud of our team. I'm really glad to be part of the team that's championed safety and understand how do we make it safer for our people. And at the same time, though, I wake up this morning thinking, gosh, what do we need to do today to make sure people are safe? Because it doesn't stop. It's not something that you can just check the box and go back and focus on real work. It's something you actively have to pursue and you actively have to continue to ask questions about and drive it and ensure people are thinking about and focused on safety. 

00:20:53 Russell Stewart
Well, and I couldn't. I couldn't have said it any better myself. And so I'm, I'm happy to have been able to have had this conversation with you today, Eric, and to champion what you guys are doing so other folks out there listening can be encouraged. Finally, you know, maybe. Let me ask you, what advice would you give to other organizations that were looking to improve their culture and their leadership? 

00:21:25 Eric Harp
Well, yeah, I know the more I know, the less I know about safety. And I would not say that we've got to figure it out, but I do know that it starts at the top of the organization. And having organization like, like Caterpillar that puts safety as one of the values is a big deal. And it's way more than just talk. Right. Everyone says they want safety, but I've learned that safety is a lot more work than you think it is. You know, as a leader, I catch myself a lot of times not thinking about safety. I'm thinking about a customer's solution or trying to solve a problem. And then I think back, if I'm not thinking about safety as a leader, then what's my team doing? And so understanding to make sure that we're keeping safety as a focus and that you're constantly reminding and being committed to that. So yeah, I think that having a safe work culture is probably a lot more work than people think, but it's worth it and it's something that's a value. And again, oil and gas, I think, I feel like the Orient industry is moving that direction that the health of employees, the safety employees, environmental concerns are of value, people are valuable. And I believe our industry is moving in that direction. 

00:22:35 Russell Stewart
Well, I'm glad you use that word value because yeah, we're actually, you kind of wonder why it took us so long to figure it out, but everybody kind of had maybe 20 years ago or longer than that, a different attitude, you know, as you were talking about, oh, you know, the job comes first and then health, safety and the environment comes, comes second because, because of value, you know, well, the real value comes in, in the health and safety of your employees because it cost you a whole lot more, you know, when you do have that, that sif. And we, we finally figured that out and I'm, I'm glad that, that we have and I'm happy to be able to have this platform to champion that and to have guests like you on to talk about it. So Eric, really appreciate you coming on the show today. 

00:23:34 Eric Harp
Russell, again, thanks for having me on again, my pleasure to be on. I'm proud to work in oil and gas, proud to champion, like you said, the value of our environment and the value of the people that work in oil and gas and our customers. So yeah, glad to be on. Appreciate what this podcast represents and all the different guests you've had on. It's been a great, a great resource for me, so thank you. 

00:23:55 Russell Stewart
Well, I appreciate that and of course that's thanks to everyone out there who's listening and making this a top rated podcast in oil and gas. And so as always for all of you out there, again, thanks for listening. Please help us stay on top by sharing with your friends, posting about us on LinkedIn. We appreciate all the positive reviews. Please take the time to keep doing that. If you're looking for a speaker, reach out to OGGN because we have a wealth of them, including yours truly here and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, Leave us a review and then go to OG ggn.com to learn about all our other shows. Don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.