How to deliver stakeholder confidence

A scenario:
• You identify an attractive investment opportunity that requires its assets to perform safely and reliably .
• You will be the subject of severe reputation and financial penalties should the plant fail to perform as contracted.
• Your main contractor is fine on deliver but is stating they have some 400 global suppliers to whom they will subcontract equipment orders.
• Safe and reliable delivery of the equipment is essential .Failure would have unacceptable negative impact on your brand and financial return.
• You have substantial uncertainty ,substantial risk and hard questioning from your stakeholders

How do you mitigate the uncertainty and lower the risk to retain the investments attractiveness to you and your stakeholder ? “Have we thoroughly evaluated all of our exposure to risk ?

Evaluation is done by answering :
• What can go wrong?
• How likely is it to go wrong?
• How bad can it get if it does go wrong?
• Do I need to worry about it?
• What are my options to protect myself?
• What is my last course of action?

A basic fact: In any unplanned stoppage or failure to meet a schedule or when an accident occurs , at least one the above will not have been addressed adequately.
Risk mitigation and hence reducing uncertainty is no more than asking the above questions, agreeing the answers and then applying them as actions.

To add real value to the vendor selection process and promote the collaboration between buyer and seller it is suggested industry looks to develop an SMART inspection vendor risk rating and assessment scheme to assist buyers evaluate their vendors against benchmarked leading practice, understand and articulate were intervention is needed and also to give vendors a tool to target for improvement their own internal weaknesses thereby minimising risk and reducing uncertainty, improving reliability, safety and hence business performance

SMART inspection is based on 3 models:
Equipment criticality ratings (Consequence modelling)
Vendor risk assessment
SMART tailored Inspection Test Plans
(mitigating the risks identified in the equipment and vendor assessments)

Conclusion. Using a SMART inspection tool buyers are working with vendors to assure the buyer gets what they want and the vendor can identify were they may be weak in delivering to the buyer and work with them to mitigate/correct the weakness.

Robin Pickup, Global Leader, Manufacturing, Lloyd’s Register

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