Digital Solutions show how collaboration helps us tackle the coronavirus situation

Kenneth Vareide

TEXT: SHILAN NAJMADIN

In December last year, reports started to emerge that a virus never seen in humans before had begun to spread in Wuhan, a large city in the Chinese province of Hubei. Since then, the virus has been spreading rapidly around the world with a growing impact on the global economy.

What could have been a good storyline for a thriller, became reality, with every one of us as the protagonists. The coronavirus has forced us to handle a range of new challenges at an unprecedented pace. We are not able to change the intro of the film, but we can have a great impact on how the story evolves and ends.

In the beginning of March, Skanska, one of the world’s leading project development and construction groups contacted Ragnar Hestvik, the QHSE Solution Manager in Digital Solutions. The company needed an incident reporting tool related to recommended and mandatory measures to reduce the risk of infection at building sites. Skanska created a checklist based on official guidelines that covered many types of incidents, such as lack of hand washing facilities, unsuitable working conditions or close contact between people at work. The Synergi Life team sat down together to come up with ways our software could improve the outcome of this story. Within only three days the team managed to develop an incident reporting scheme that Skanska successfully implemented.

The Synergi Life team realised that other companies might have the same needs and issues and organized a coronavirus specific webinar with presenters from DNV GL and our customers, Skanska, Hydro and the Norwegian Oil and

Gas Association (NOROG). The focus of the webinar was on business continuity in these challenging times. All companies shared best practices and their approach of how to tackle the crisis.

“From the start of the coronavirus outbreak, the health and safety of our employees, customers and business relations have been our primary focus. We realised that now is the time to focus even more on the impact our digital solutions have on people’s lives, and collectively recognised the critical role our business has,” explains Ragnar Hestvik.

The story continues. After the webinar, all participants have been invited to a Teams meeting to share more of their specific needs. Given the magnitude of this evolving situation, Digital Solutions partnered up with the Risk Management team in Oil and Gas UK, Group Security and health experts in Business Assurance to create a pool of expert resources. This collaboration gives DNV GL a competitive advantage in the market and creates additional value to what we can offer to customers to handle the crisis.

Together the team created a business contingency model to help organisations understand the potential impact to their businesses and gauge their readiness and response. The model consists of six different tool that can be purchased

individually depending on the organisations’ needs:

Infection form – A form where all sick, infected, previous infected or quarantined employees can report their status.

• Emergency response plan – An emergency plan for a business in case of a new infection wave. • Infection risk assessment – A risk assessment where core risks are highlighted. • Safe workplace assessment –

Inspection of workplace based on guidelines. • Travel risk assessment – Checklist that needs to be filled out and approved before travel. • Observations – Reporting observations where guidelines are not being followed or reporting failures in measures introduced.

The business contingency model is under constant evaluation as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds but Digital Solutions’ Sales team in the UK already got very good feedback from customers.

While the story continues to unfold, Digital Solutions showed that collaboration is the key to enable innovation and to tackle the challenges that this pandemic has placed right in front of us.

Arve Johan Kalleklev

Region Oil & Gas Norway & Eurasia

Region Oil & Gas Norway & Eurasia has since 2018 shared market and other news on Yammer. The news is a selection of important contract wins, new developments related to technology and services and other market info.

TEXT: ANDERS HUSBY

Apart from the pure information side, we have seen a positive effect of more cooperation as more and more are raising their hands based on the Yammer info.

The intention has all the way been to let colleagues know ‘what is going on’, not only in their own section or unit, but in a bit wider area.

The use of Yammer has slowly but steadily developed, and the number of contributors has increased to include a widespread selection of colleagues like project managers, experts, engineers, business leaders, consultants and support personnel.

Apart from the pure information side, we have seen a positive effect of more cooperation as more and more are raising their hands based on the Yammer info. Using the comment field with the typical approach ‘This sounds interesting, I have also something going on with this customer…’ or ‘I may be able to help here…’ creates positive dialogue and common opportunities. We saw that mentioning which colleague that was involved each news story, also helped.

Since the Covid-19 situation hit us with low oil price and a dramatic change in business environment, we saw the need for further information and not at least making sure that we utilized our people to the max across the lines of organizations. Therefore, we decided to have a regional update each week with sales news, market info and some examples of what we have achieved.

Highlighting our success stories is more important than ever, and show that we are doing right things!