Interviews and Case Studies

Download the 2019 Agenda

Europe’s #1 event dedicated to Operational Excellence & Risk Management Summit! 

Returning to London on 18-20 November 2019, the Operational Excellence & Risk Management Summit will bring together over 150 Operations leaders - all in one location - to strategise on how to manage change, increase efficiency and optimise productivity - without compromising reliability, safety, and compliance.

World class industry speakers confirmed in 2018 included Royal Dutch Shell, Veolia, BP, Arkema and many more.

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Governance at Thames Water

Karl Simons, Health, Safety, Security and Wellbeing Director at Thames Water, explains how they have created a defined risk framework that underpins standards and rules to consistently protect their people. 

Leadership Behaviours that Drive a Culture of Operational Excellence

In this new and exclusive interview, Diane Chadwick-Jones, Director of Leadership and Culture at BP, talks to us about embedding – and sustaining - a culture of operational excellence in a large multinational company. By identifying key culture change inhibitors and then implementing specific training and change management tools to tackle those inhibitors, leaders can build a strong safety culture that drives operational excellence.

The Final Frontier - What the oil and gas industry can learn from NASA's PRA tools

David Kaplan - Head of Safety & Mission Assurance at NASA - shares 6 key lessons learned from NASA’s experience with Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) and how to apply some of these risk assessment tools to the challenges and new regulations that impact the oil and gas industry.

Developing an Impactful Safety and Supply Chain Strategy

In this exclusive interview, we spoke with Simon Watson - Head of Health, Safety, Security and Wellbeing at Thames Water - about Thames Water’s ground breaking approach in using psychology alongside organisational performance to select supply chain partnerships.

Reimagining the Workforce with Anglo American

In the lead up to the Operational Excellence in Risk Management Summit, we sat down with Jennifer Rogers, Head of Learning at Anglo American to discuss their ‘Reimagine Learning’ programme and how the organization is transforming their workforce in order to remain competitive in an evolving and changing industry.

Human Performance and Risk Management with BP

In the lead up to the Operational Excellence & Risk Management Summit, we sat down with Hugo Ashkar, Global Risk Manager and Diane Chadwick-Jones, Director of Human Performance at BP to discuss how they are establishing a Human Performance framework at the global energy giant.

Changing Culture and Operational Excellence At SCS Railways

SCS Railways is a joint venture between Skanska, Costain, and Strabag. With three different companies comes three different cultures – how can you integrate these to drive Operational Excellence? In this exclusive interview with Dan Platten, Director, Health, Safety, Wellbeing & Security at SCS Railways we discuss just that, and how to influence long lasting culture change.

Controlling Risk in a Dangerous World: How to prevent the next accident

Exclusive interview with Jim Wetherbee, the only American astronaut to have commanded five missions in space, a former Vice President of Operational Leadership at BP and author of the recently published “Controlling Risk"! 

In this exclusive interview, Jim discusses the ten common adverse conditions that existed in companies that experienced a major safety incident and how to use the presence and severity of these conditions as indicators to determine if your organization may be drifting toward a disaster.

Download the full interview to find out more.

Leading Millennials to Operational Excellence

Everyone seems to have an opinion about the millennial generation – positive, negative, or otherwise. Regardless, it is difficult to deny that this blossoming generation grew up in a very different environment than preceding generations.

These differences invariably lead to different perspectives, priorities, and practices. As leaders working in hazardous industries, it is imperative to understand, embrace and leverage these differences to maximize your company’s performance.

In this interview, Matt DiGeronimo, Vice President of Operations at Veolia, shares his experience working with millennials in the military and energy industries and presents suggestions for leading this generation on your journey to operational excellence.

Safety Culture at Arkema: Focusing on culture to drive Operational Excellence

At a time when the industry is putting increased pressure on improving operational efficiency, how can you ensure that safety remains a top priority for your organization? 

Paul Leonard – Vice President of Health, Safety and Environment at Arkema – shares his insights on the company’s journey to safety excellence and how they focused on culture to drive operational excellence and become one of the safest chemical companies in the world.

Maximizing Continuous Improvement at Europe's largest refinery

In this exclusive interview, Ýr Gunnarsdóttir – Operational Excellence / Continuous Improvement Leader for Shell, talks us through how Continuous Improvement (CI) can act as a key enabler for business performance and outcome and how CI ways of working enabled Shell to start-up the Pernis refinery in less than one month after a full shut-down due to a power failure.

Leveraging Data to Mitigate Asset Risk at Suncor

Leigh Mork, Director of Maintenance and Reliability Integration at Suncor Energy, shares Suncor’s approach to mitigating asset risk and how to use asset information to enable safe, reliable and cost effective operations.