On September 9th and 10th of 2019, Operational Sustainability, LLC® held its second Operational Excellence (OE) Conference at the Norris Conference Center at City Centre here in Houston, Texas. Approximately 100 people attended, including partners and industry SMEs. Founder and CEO David Drerup opened the conference keynote with a renewed commitment to serving customers with their OESuite™ of intelligent, real-time decision support and risk management applications that integrate heretofore silos of multiple products. The company is celebrating its 10th year in business. OESuite focuses on the oil & gas, petrochemicals, chemicals, utilities, mining, water / wastewater, and food & beverage markets. They have more than 30 clients, some with 50+ sites.
OESuite
The OESuite software platform offers some 40 modules covering workforce competency, process safety, asset performance management, operations, workforce, and EH&S to enable improved governance, efficiency, and integration. As such, it overlaps with a number of siloed applications such as EAM, APM, quality, and EH&S. But unlike siloed applications, OESuite provides integration at the database and workflow levels. Each module can have multiple workflows, enabling organizations to standardize their business processes while affording facilities some level of customization. The modules are interoperable, so one can start anywhere and take advantage of more functionality as they go. Integration with SAP and other leading enterprise applications are supported. One can license one or more modules as needed.
Operational Excellence Conference
The conference focus was on three aspects of intelligent operations, a.k.a. the enabler of OE:
- First, instead of integrating disparate applications to support OE, why not leverage a suite of applications integrated by design and interfaced to monument systems using connectors (e.g., ERP, EAM, historian, control systems, etc.) where needed.
- Second, OE should include decision support and greater operational insight than available from siloed metrics.
- Third, the key to OE is organization, culture and the management systems which support them. All lead to the dictum that sustainable excellence comes from executing your business strategy more consistently and reliably than the competition.
Challenges Ahead
OS boasts a small yet very loyal customer base along with strong relationships with BP, Chemours, Ashland, and Accenture. To continue to prosper, OS needs to continue to grow. The OE market is dynamic and includes many larger competitors, in particular those leading Environmental Health AND Safety (EH&S) vendors such as Enablon, Sphera, Sparta, etc. Perhaps their most direct competitor is J5, now part of Hexagon PPM. J5 operates in the same industry verticals as OS but offers far fewer OE modules, primarily in operations, maintenance and mobility, but none in APM, EAM, risk, quality, EH&S, and workforce management.
OS should leverage its agility and responsiveness to deliver the solutions industry demands faster than competitors who typically have longer development cycles. OS started their journey by focusing on compliance in the Process Safety and EH&S areas, where they have strong functionality. As their installed base asks them to expand their offering, they are building more feature rich functionality. In the past 2 years, they have been focused on operations and APM functionality as several of their larger clients have adopted this part of their suite and are collaborating with them to create new modules.
Takeaways
No matter what path OS takes, they must elevate the message that an integrated suite of interoperable applications is key to OE and to underpinning the management systems which support it. For current end users, the ride is just beginning. Those end-users considering individual EH&S and risk software solutions, or are looking to integrate disparate applications, you may find that rather than integrating of group of best of breed applications, moving to OS is far easier given their connectors, ease of configuration and their flexible architecture.
