Incident Management System Case Study

Overview

Sieger & Co designed and developed an incident management system for an energy company in Nigeria.

This system was designed to enable visual tracking of incidents such as crude theft or asset vandalization.

The assets of many energy companies operating in various countries are often under threat. In the Niger-Delta for example, assets often have to be protected either by armed security, or by obscurity. Despite this, security incidents (such as asset vandalism, crude theft, community unrest et cetera) still occur occasionally, and these incidents need to be recorded for mitigation or corrective action.

The aim of the development of this system was to ease long term storage and retrieval of incident data and to assist stakeholders in easy detection of specific problem areas using advanced data visualization and analytics techniques. The system also needed to be accessible to stakeholders and security personnel wherever they were - within or outside the office environment.

Tags	Cloud Computing, Mobile Application Development
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Challenge

Our solution

While long-term storage for incident data was available, retrieval was difficult and complicated

The team responsible for incident management at this company previously used spreadsheet software to store incident data. While this helped them handle long-term storage, it made retrieval rather difficult because multiple documents were used to record incidents (one document per quarter) and filtering these documents to find specific incidents or problematic locations was difficult.

Sieger & Co created a cloud based system (hosted with Amazon Web Services) to handle incident management at this company. The new system is backed by a database which greatly simplifies long-term data storage and retrieval. The use of a database allows incidents to be retrieved based on location, incident type, et cetera.

The previous incident management system could not be accessed from locations in the field

The Sieger & Co designed solution includes a mobile application which grants approved field workers and security operatives access to the incident management system within field locations.

This mobile application can be used to report new incidents and provide any relevant details. It also enables users to take or upload pictures pertinent to the incident and record the incidents location. This data is then uploaded immediately to the AWS servers and displayed on the web dashboard. The relevant stakeholders are also notified of the incident via email.

All communication between the mobile application and the cloud-hosted parent application was secured by two-way SSL/TLS encryption.

The previous system did not enable pattern recognition or data analytics on recorded incidents

The incident management system we created is designed around a map-based interface which prominently features the locations of assets such as wells, pipelines, flow stations et cetera, as well as those of incidents and their details.

This enables stakeholders at the company make connections between incidents and assets much more quickly and intuitively.

Results:

Replacing the previous Excel based storage method with this system led to an approximately 40% reduction in incident response and resolution time. This reduction was primarily due to the automated email notifications sent to all stakeholders after an incident is reported (which usually caused management led pressure to resolve the incident), as well as the visual, location-based presentation of incidents in the web application.

The new system also enables easy long-term storage and retrieval of incident data and is directly accessible to approved users wherever they are. Recorded incidents are also much more searchable, by incident type, date, location et cetera.

Future Work:

This system is currently being extended to use artificial intelligence to determine likely incident locations based on previous incident data. These locations of interest will then be automatically surveilled intermittently by drones. These surveillance flights can also be triggered by an unexpected loss of fluid pressure or volume, or by an authorized user of the system.

Technologies:

HTML, CSS, JS (Frontend Development), Angular (Android and IOS App Development), Amazon Web Services (Cloud Hosting for web assets), Google Cloud Firebase (Cloud Database), Python, DroneKit SDK (Drone Software Development).