Permit to work guru saw many changes

Doug Hogan saw a lot of changes in permit to work systems in his 20 years at the Gladstone Power Station.

And he’s just a little sad that he won’t be on deck for the full implementation of the Permit Administration System following his retirement in June, 2005.

“It was all manual, handwritten, typed and photocopied when I came to Gladstone as the isolations’ officer in 1985,” Doug recalled, “If we had to make a change to any part of a permit or isolation we had to rewrite or retype the whole thing, but that’s how it was everywhere back then.”

Gladstone, Queensland’s largest power generator, then moved to an early word processing unit which saved Doug and his team some time, even though the PTW system was still manual.

In 1993, while still under the former Queensland Electricity Commission, Gladstone worked with a Brisbane programmer to become the first Queensland power station to develop an automated relational database. The software was keyboard driven but robust enough to handle a browser face front end which was added several years ago.

Gladstone continued with the system when the power station was privatised, but last year management decided to adopt a fully computerised permit to work system, driven, in part, by the new Queensland Electrical Safety Act.

“I didn’t like PAS when I first saw it,” Doug said candidly, “I didn’t like the tractor feed printouts and some other things, but Sage Technology worked really closely with us and made a lot of modifications to get PAS to perform as we needed it to.”

In fact, explained PAS Product Director, Peter Kingwill, the modifications built for NRG Gladstone had led to the release of Version 2.0 of PAS and would benefit all PAS users.

“The changes in the new version provide significant enhancements, increase the flexibility of PAS and address several minor issues,” Peter said, “And although they have been largely driven by NRG Gladstone and the requirements of the new Queensland Electrical Safety Act, the most important thing is that they also improve the safety benefits of PAS.”

Doug Hogan is also a champion of the Queensland Generators’ Permit to Work Committee.

“We get together twice a year and discuss problems and resolve issues about PTW. It’s all nuts and bolts stuff and it’s important to keep it at that level with the people who are hands on with permit to work issues,” he said.

The committee lobbied the Queensland Government during the drafting of the electrical safety legislation, and works to resolve common issues.

“The committee didn’t meet for a couple of years following privatisation because of confidentiality concerns, but we were able to demonstrate to the corporations that there were more benefits in discussing our permit to work issues than keeping them under wraps,” Doug said.

The Queensland Generators PTW Committee is supported by all of that state’s power generators.

Doug will share his experiences as a keynote speaker at the inaugural meeting of the Victorian Electricity Generators PTW Committee in Morwell on Friday, October 14.

In his 20 years as isolations’ officer, a title which grew to Production Support/Isolations’ Officer by his retirement, Doug has documented and maintained thousands of isolations in the NRG Gladstone database. He said the task of transferring all of that information and knowledge to build the plant index and Standard Isolation Lists (SILs) in PAS was a major exercise.

“Gladstone have four blokes inputting the information,” Doug said, “It’s not a matter of being a good typist, they need to have the thought process and the technological understanding to make sure it’s done properly.”

Key personnel have undergone train the trainer training in readiness to train other personnel in the use of PAS, while Gladstone and TRUenergy Yallourn, in Victoria, will be the first PAS sites to use the newly-developed SIL copy tool, a separate stand-alone tool which has been developed in Microsoft Excel by Sage Technology. The copy tool aims to reduce the time taken to create SILs by enabling SILs to be copied for same types of plants which exist several times such as multiple pulverising mills.

Gladstone is on target to trial PAS in its turbine area, a self-contained section of the power station within the coming months.

And while Doug has formally retired, he hopes to be involved in the implementation of PAS in some way, either on a part-time or contract basis.

“I don’t like leaving a project mid-way, I like to see things through to the end,” he said.

In the meantime, he is continuing with his retirement plans which include moving into his new house when it’s completed, some interstate and international travel, and continuing as a Level One coach for masters (veteran) swimmers.