DETAILS
Client name: Confidential
Project name: PMS & HSE Audit on Offshore Assets
Date / duration: July-September 2025
Country: United Arab Emirates
General project information
Dolfines was commissioned by a client in the energy sector in the United Arab Emirates to conduct an audit addressing Non-Productive Time (NPT), HSE and organizational issues in the domain of the maintenance systems affecting the offshore assets that they currently have under contact. The objective was to identify the root causes of operational downtime and technical issues on the drilling facilities, while assessing preventive maintenance practices and on-site HSE standards.
Methodology
Initially, two auditors were assigned to assess preventive maintenance across nine rigs,and , later, a third auditor focused on eleven rigs, concentrating specifically on HSE practices. Before deploying the teams on-site, document reviews were conducted.
After the documentation reviews, and prior to being mobilized to the rigs, the inspectors in charge of the preventive maintenance assessment spent time in the offices of our client to discuss with management the main issues our client was facing. Subsequently, inspectors were mobilized to the drilling rigs where, besides visual inspections of equipment, they conducted interviews with rig management and maintenance staff to try to understand the root causes of downtime, including managerial causes.
Project Results
One of the main challenges, identified in the early days of the audit, was the lack of clear responsibility allocation among the different groups involved in the operations of the rigs, which led to downtime and delays, and to increased costs.
To address this issue, Dolfines mapped the operational management process involving all stakeholders and conducted in-depth interviews with maintenance teams and managers both on-site and at the offices.
More than 120 man-days were dedicated to the project, combining on-site work and remote analysis. To clarify responsibilities and improve intervention management, daily reports were produced throughout the three-month engagement. A final report and a detailed presentation were subsequently delivered to the client, providing full visibility into the root causes of NPT and actionable recommendations to optimize preventive maintenance and strengthen HSE practices across the facilities.
One of the conclusions of the audit was that the drilling and maintenance departments of the drilling contractor were not aligned with respect to scheduled maintenance stoppages. Since there was a culture that led to scheduled rig stoppages not to be favored, nobody wanted to be responsible for a programed rig stoppage and, thus, planned ig stoppages were not popular. Therefore, there was a non-written preference to let equipment break and repair it only once it broke.
Another conclusion is that our client, certainly pressed by production targets, did not enforce contractually mechanisms to ensure that preventive maintenance, what includes planned equipment stoppages, was performed by the drilling contractor.
Finally, interviews on the rig sites allowed Dolfines’ inspectors to realize that there were important issues with respect to procurement of spare parts leading to significant delays that impacted the non-productive time.
