A Scots entrepreneur has created a new solution for managing quality control and increasing visibility during the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) phase of large oil and gas development projects globally after investing around £250,000 in the project.
Verum Solutions is led by founder and CEO Paul Milligan – a QA/QC specialist with more than 30 years’ experience in the oil and gas industry. Paul, who hails from Stirling, left Scotland in the mid-1990s and has worked for various major operators and EPC contractors in diverse locations worldwide.
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The business, which has offices in Glasgow and Monaco, has worked with industry specialists over the past two years to develop and test the unique cloud-based technology, Qvis.
The technology, which gathers and presents project data on a traffic light system of QC leading indicators during the construction stage, allows asset-holders to intervene, where necessary, to prevent future cost and schedule overruns.
Verum expects to create up to five new jobs in Aberdeen by early 2019 and is exploring opening a dedicated office in the Granite City.
Paul Milligan said: “The inspiration behind Qvis came from personal experience over the past 30 years. Through witnessing the same quality issues on almost every project associated with the delivery of equipment packages and, during construction and commissioning, it was clear that there must be a better way.
“Management practices for other aspects of project management, particularly HSE, have evolved greatly and been very successful in driving incident rates down. Meanwhile, the overriding strategy to manage the QC on projects has remained static.
“Since the concept of the inspection and test plan (ITP) was first developed in the 1960s, multiple stakeholders have been required to routinely attend inspections at the same time, often driven by mutual mistrust.
“It should come as no surprise then that the same quality-related issues are observed on every project and the data gathered usually has minimal value in terms of predicting future QC performance. These issues usually manifest at the critical phase of mechanical completion and commissioning, or worse, during start-up.”
The Qvis technology was recently successfully utilised on a large floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) installed in the North Sea. Safety and production systems were quickly commissioned onshore and the unit achieved first oil within what is believed to be record time. Further, no quality or regulatory issues associated with the build phase manifested during start-up, or since steady state operations was achieved.
Qvis technology is applicable to any oil and gas capital project onshore or offshore, irrespective of size, location or complexity. By leveraging the knowledge of existing project teams and better directing the use of temporary QC resources and third-party inspectors, clients can be assured that any quality issues will be identified and corrected early.
Paul added: “By providing greater visibility and simultaneously tracking the QC performance of all project suppliers and construction contractors in real time, operators utilising Qvis are well positioned to substantiate their concerns over quality with unequivocal data.
“Qvis reduces the costs of managing this historical mistrust by identifying any underlying factors whilst providing much greater assurance that factory acceptance tests (FAT) and final inspections will be flawless.”
