Accelerating Industry Performance Through Collaborative Continual Improvement

Abstract

CEPA Integrity First® (Integrity First), led by the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) and a condition of membership, acts as a foundation for continual improvement, bringing our members together to share and implement leading practices in the areas of safety, environment and socio-economics. Integrity First includes three principles and ten priority areas (such as emergency management, pipeline integrity and water protection) where members collaborate, share leading practices and hold each other accountable. Integrity First is a management systems approach designed by CEPA members for industry to achieve collaborative continual improvement. It supports the collective setting of priorities, plans, assessments and improvements. While spreadsheets enabled the first rounds of assessments, CEPA required a solution that engaged multiple stakeholders over a complex timeline, coordinated activities clearly and precisely, while keeping the process transparent and efficient. The information generated is sensitive, so it must be kept secure while still being available for aggregation, reporting and reference. It needed to house communication tools so members could easily pull information and lastly, it needed to be easy to use. In August of 2015, CEPA established a partnership with SPAN Consulting (SPAN) to address these challenges through its software as a service (SaaS) offering called Octane™. This paper will review how CEPA designed and implemented a technical, web-based solution to enable an efficient, effective and transparent Integrity First with transformative impact. Specifically, through the use of this technology, there are now stronger communities of practice across industry with increased focus and effort on the opportunities to improve through real-time self-serve access to industry’s overall benchmarked performance, leadership and leading practices. CEPA’s commitment to enabling Integrity First is resulting in better adoption and improved performance.