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Lines of Contact – Tackling the Biggest Challenges to Worldwide Communication in the Oil and Gas Business

When a disaster occurs, communication is vital. Management, shareholders, and employees must be connected, and emergency responders need to know immediately when something has gone wrong. That task is hard enough for individual offices, but it becomes monumental for large enterprises.

Many modern oil and gas organizations operate in several countries. Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, operates in than 70 countries, while Chevron works in more than 30. Every nation has its own language, laws, and technology. This presents numerous distinct challenges where emergency communication is concerned:

Language Barriers

Language barriers can be the same amount of a threat to emergency communication amid a disaster as an inadequately-outlined or poorly-coordinated solution. Therefore, an emergency communication tool in a worldwide industrial undertaking should have the capacity to broadcast automatically in multiple languages. The choices – constantly swapping between language settings or depending on a patchwork of solutions – are neither satisfactory nor feasible in a crisis.

Infrastructure Complexity and Cost

Building a cutting-edge refinery is extraordinarily expensive, as the $8.5 billion price tag on this Alberta, Canada refinery can bear witness to. With such overwhelming sunk costs, it's no big surprise such vast numbers of Canadian oil firms keep producing and selling at a loss – particularly given that even 1.6 hours of downtime weekly can, through the span of a year, add up to over $46 million just in salary pay. In the face of such a testing atmosphere, anything you can do to cut down operating costs is fundamental.

Diminishing infrastructural complexity achieves this, in addition to decreasing general operating expenses. In a partnership with tens or many distinct offices, even a little change can have an enormous impact. Along with that similar vein, even a slight bottleneck, if present in multiple offices, may wind up costing more than you can bear. That incorporates a jerry-rigged way to deal with emergency communications. You should have the capacity to serve all your communication needs from a single platform.

Regional Differences in Technology

Working in different regions and countries implies different facilities will probably wind up operating with different toolsets whenever they communicate with different organizations. Gadgets like handheld radios, for instance, run on a different frequency in the US than they do in the UK or Korea. What's more, certain radio types, smartphones, or network hardware may be more prevalent – and all the more generally supported – in one area than in another.

The capacity to quickly and successfully coordinate your emergency communication platform into these various conditions is accordingly significant. What you wouldn't want is seeing your team battling with incompatible tools when they are trying to contact emergency responders.

The Solution

With the end goal to guarantee consistent, global business safety and reliance, your oil and gas company needs an emergency communication tools that incorporate multiple languages and brings together different technology, including existing mass notification frameworks investments like two-way radios and giant voice.

It is likewise more than only a warning framework. It provides dynamic messaging for everyone in the company during both regular operations and crisis situations, and it makes it simple to connect with any individual who needs to be reached in a crisis. All the more essential, it is architected as a global platform, and already safeguards oil and gas employees across the world.

In addition to having a moderately low aggregate cost of ownership, AtHoc can spare some cash in many ways, for example, potentially bringing down protection costs, constraining the extent of damage in a crisis, and lessening operational downtime. An investment in AtHoc offers savings beyond the initial cost, particularly for a worldwide organization.

For more information on what AtHoc can do for your business, click here.

Efraim Petel

About Efraim Petel