Making specialist expertise repeatable

A CoreData functional safety case study

An engineering services business depended on a small group of functional safety specialists to deliver complex assessments and reports. CoreData worked alongside the company to turn its expert knowledge, spreadsheets and forms into a structured application. The result was a more repeatable way to deliver projects, allowing experienced staff to take on more of the work while senior specialists continued to provide technical judgment and oversight.

The constraint was scarce expert time

The company served oil and gas clients whose facilities required careful examination of potential hazards and their consequences. Assignments brought together operations personnel, process engineers, instrumentation and electrical engineers, and representatives of the engineering consultant. The work included process hazard analysis (PHA), hazard and operability studies (HAZOP), layer of protection analysis (LOPA) and safety integrity level (SIL) assessments. Each participant understood a different part of the facility. A functional safety specialist facilitated the discussion and made sense of the findings.

Much of the supporting work lived in spreadsheets and forms maintained by individual engineers. Automation varied from one person to another. Junior staff could take minutes and perform administrative tasks, but moving from those notes to a defensible technical assessment still depended heavily on the senior specialist. Expanding the business therefore meant finding more people with expertise that was both expensive and difficult to recruit.

Following the work from discussion to report

The challenge extended well beyond recording meeting minutes. A workshop identified possible deviations, their consequences and the concerns requiring further analysis. The specialist then formalized the findings, applied the relevant assessment methods and calculations, and developed recommendations for the engineering or operating team.

The work continued as those teams addressed the recommendations and the results were checked through the applicable validation activities. Information gathered at the beginning had to remain useful through analysis, corrective work and the final report. CoreData’s task was to make that working process easier to carry out consistently, while preserving the role of the professionals responsible for it.

Making the knowledge usable

Development began with an initial prototype in 2002 and grew into a relationship lasting more than a decade. Over an approximately five-year period of iterative development, CoreData worked with three client-side specialists to translate their knowledge into usable software. Their contribution went beyond identifying formulas. They helped define how an engineer should work through a problem, what information was needed and how the results should be presented.

The application organized the work into sections covering matters such as deviations, assets and environmental consequences. During a session, the facilitator could work through a prescribed sequence of questions and answers on screen. This gave the discussion a consistent structure and helped capture information in a form that could support the subsequent analysis.

CoreData also developed visual presentations of the specialist calculations. These helped users understand the analysis without having to interpret everything directly from the underlying mathematics. The specialists used the tools on real customer assignments and brought the results back into development. Repeated use shaped the presentation, the workflow and the practical usefulness of the application.

Changing how projects could be staffed

The guided process changed the work that could be assigned to other members of the team. For certain smaller-facility sessions, an intermediate engineer with previous facilitation experience could follow the established process rather than relying entirely on a senior specialist to lead every step.

That distinction mattered. The application supported competent people working within a defined method; specialist assessment and judgment remained part of the service. As more of the structured project work could be carried out by other engineers, the senior specialists could guide multiple assignments and concentrate their attention where their expertise was most needed.

During the engagement, CoreData observed the business grow from a small engineering team into a substantially larger organization supported by a relatively small number of senior specialists. The company’s leadership described the software as an important part of its ability to scale. That growth involved more than software, but the change in how work could be distributed was a practical outcome we saw while working alongside the team.

A useful starting point for other expert businesses

Many specialist businesses face a similar constraint: important knowledge is embedded in the spreadsheets, working habits and experience of a few people. A useful application can capture the repeatable parts of that work, make the process visible and help a wider team apply it consistently.

This case began with a focused prototype and developed through sustained collaboration with the people who understood the subject. The same starting question is useful elsewhere: which parts of an expert’s daily work can be made more repeatable, and which decisions must remain with the expert?

Discuss your specialist workflow

If your service depends on complex spreadsheets, recurring technical reports or a small number of key specialists, CoreData can help examine where a structured application could support your team. Start with one workflow, the people who know it and the decisions that need to stay under their control.

Discuss your specialist workflow