Energy is a powerful commodity: it supports our everyday lives, but without care, it is potentially dangerous. The industry pays enormous attention to safety, but incidents still occur—sometimes deadly, such as the Deepwater Horizon and San Bruno explosions. Given the inherent risks, energy companies must navigate a web of regulations, which span every level of government. For example, local rules about land use; state rules about water, safety, energy mix, or consumer service requirements; federal rules about interstate projects and operations; even international treaties governing the energy trade. As a result of living under regulatory scrutiny for more than a century, energy companies are averse to risk and try to control for it through detailed and rigorous processes. This makes them slow to change.

In a physically oriented, highly regulated sector, the engineer is king. Oil and gas and power companies are dominated by current and former engineers who have risen to the executive ranks. As such, these organizations are enmeshed in an engineering mindset: a love of large, comprehensive projects, a premium on finding the perfect solution up front, detailed planning to the highest degree, and a preference for rigorous analysis and process over fast judgments and flexibility.

The work of energy companies depends on an extensive and fragmented supply chain. Industries such as airlines and automotive also depend on a complex supply base, but the energy industry puts supplier collaboration at the heart of operations. For example, a shale play requires a huge cascade of parties—owner companies that provide funding and regulatory engagement, third parties that drill, others that haul water and sand, others that build surface facilities, and others that integrate all these activities—just to produce a barrel of oil.

Many energy executives have been at the same company for at least 30 years—unusual for today—rising through the ranks by running a well-worn playbook. Such discipline makes sense given the complexities of managing a business that is physical, high risk, highly engineered, and fragmented. These people were rewarded not on innovation but on caution and following tradition and are thus more practiced at surviving business cycles than driving sustained change.

Energy companies go where the resources are. Often, this requires companies to span remarkably diverse regions: from Texas to Angola, California to India, Germany to Indonesia, the Persian Gulf to China. The legal and operating environments in these regions vary dramatically—even relatively simple things such as internet connectivity cannot be taken for granted. Some governments are content to let markets be, others use energy investments to promote national development. Labor forces vary in capability, reliability, size, and cost. Supply chains vary in maturity. And legal recourse runs the gamut from impartial courts to relying on knowing the right people.

You can give contractors access to Cosmos Forms without the need to have them access your other business systems. This means that everyone involved in your business can use the same process.

Automatically send emails with attached reports to customers, partners, contractors or employees upon form completion or a specified step in process.

Record and track your assets from acquisition through disposition in real time. Capture all inspection and maintenance activities (online or offline) using QR code quick entry. See last inspection details when entering a new inspection and track maintenance and corrective actions across the organization.  Use a mobile form to capture vehicle and equipment movements. Always know what equipment is at the site.

By adopting an integrated suite of digital solutions, the amount of time focused on collecting data and collating it to make it useful is significantly reduced.  Onboard new workers, track worker certifications and competencies in the field where it matters. This means that HSE teams and leaders can focus on building an engaged workplace safety culture rather than the collection and summarization of data.

Cosmos Forms is in use in many industries – industrial maintenance/repair operations for producers, oil field services and manufacturing to name a few.  It is an integral part of complex global manufacturing operations where it is used for safety, quality, and the manufacturing process itself.  We help organizations meet their ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001 requirements.  Although simple to use and maintain, Cosmos Forms is powerful and flexible.

This means that it performs the same everywhere in the world. It also means that we scale ‘instantly’ to handle any volume so that you will see no performance lags. The combination of Cosmos Forms solutions built on the Microsoft Cloud and Power Platform technologies gives our customers the flexibility to integrate with existing business systems, automate any process, and track any data.

Collecting data can be done many ways – bringing it all together in a comprehensive suite of standard reports together with empowering our customers to easily modify and extend the reporting is unique to Cosmos Insights.  We give our customers the power to turn data into insights, and insights into actions.