Oil & Gas: Production

Getting Ready for ISO 45001 Certification

A mid-sized upstream operator preparing for ISO 45001 certification.

We rebuilt the operator's safety management system around what crews do in the field, and it was certified with no nonconformities at the Stage 2 audit.

Nonconformities raised at the Stage 2 certification audit

~33%

Smaller safety documentation set after retiring unused procedures

Situation

ISO 45001:2018 replaced OHSAS 18001 as the international standard for occupational health and safety management systems. For upstream operators it has become a commercial gate. Major operators and joint-venture partners increasingly ask for it at prequalification.

This operator's system had grown by accretion. A procedure was added after an incident, a policy was updated for a regulatory change, a checklist came across with an asset transfer. Nobody owned the document lifecycle that Clause 7.5 calls for. A near-miss the previous year made the risk concrete. Crews had been completing a permit-to-work step out of the documented sequence, and nobody could say which of the operator's dozens of procedures still described real work.

What we did

We ran two workstreams at once. One was a formal gap assessment against ISO 45001 and the relevant API recommended practices. The other was field verification. We shadowed crews through permit-to-work cycles, lockout/tagout and job safety analysis (JSA) briefings to see what happened on site, without reference to the paperwork.

Clause area	Documents before	What we saw in the field	Resolution
5.4: Worker participation	Policy existed, undated	Inconsistent across crews	One participation protocol, tested in the field
6.1.2: Hazard identification	Generic site-wide JSA template	Crews improvised site-specific hazards	JSA template rebuilt per site class and validated by crews
8.1: Operational control (permit-to-work)	Sequence did not match practice	Crews had reordered steps informally	Procedure rewritten to the verified safe sequence
9.2: Internal audit	No standing internal audit function	No independent verification cycle	Internal audit team recruited and trained

After the rebuild we ran a mock audit structured like the certification body's Stage 1 document review and Stage 2 on-site audit.

Impact

Stage 1 closed with no major nonconformities and two minor observations, both resolved before Stage 2 was scheduled.
Stage 2, the on-site implementation audit, raised nothing in any classification, and the certificate was granted.
About a third of the safety documentation was retired. Those procedures had no corresponding field practice.
A trained internal team now runs the Clause 9.2 audit cycle itself. Certification holds for a three-year cycle with annual surveillance, and the operator's first surveillance audit falls twelve months after certification.

What made it work

Write the procedure to match safe practice

Where crews were already doing the job safely but differently from the document, we changed the document. Forcing a paper process onto sound practice would have recreated the gap behind the near-miss.

A Stage 2 auditor asks to see the work, not only the procedure. A smaller set of procedures that crews follow exactly holds up better under that test than a large library an auditor can sample and find drifting.

Results

ISO 45001 certification granted with zero nonconformities at Stage 2

Documentation set reduced by approximately one-third

An internal audit team trained ahead of the first surveillance audit

Engagement facts

Sector: Oil & Gas: Production
Practice area: HSE Advisory
Client profile: Mid-sized upstream operator
Services: ISO 45001 gap assessment, field verification, mock audit, internal auditor training
Key phases: Gap assessment and field verification; mock audit; Stage 1 and Stage 2 audits

This case study is a composite drawn from multiple engagements. Client details have been changed and combined to protect confidentiality, and figures are representative rather than attributable to any single client.