Background: Serica Energy and the case for platform consolidation
Serica Energy is one of the UK's most active independent North Sea operators, with a portfolio centred on the Bruce, Keith, and Rhum fields alongside a growing number of acquired and operated assets. As an operator that has grown through acquisition as well as organic development, Serica has had to build an operational assurance framework that works consistently across assets that did not start from the same baseline.
When Serica reviewed their digital operational tools, the picture was familiar to many North Sea operators: individual functions were being managed on separate platforms, some legacy, some modern, none fully integrated. Handovers and event logging were handled on an existing digital system that had served its purpose but was no longer keeping pace with what the business required. Operational assurance tasks, safety overrides, and temporary and portable equipment registers were managed through a combination of the legacy system and manual processes alongside it.
The decision to migrate to Elisian's platform was driven by the opportunity to consolidate these functions into a single, integrated operational management system — eliminating the friction of working across multiple tools and creating a consistent, auditable record of operational activity across the asset portfolio.
What Serica needed from a replacement platform
The requirements were shaped by the breadth of what needed to move. This was not a single-module replacement — it was a platform migration covering four distinct operational functions that the teams relied on daily:
- Handovers and events — structured, searchable handover logs with event tagging, priority flagging, and the ability to track items from shift to shift until closed out
- Operational assurance tasks — a managed register of outstanding actions from audits, inspections, incident investigations, and management reviews, with ownership, due dates, and escalation visibility
- Safety overrides — a controlled register of all active inhibits, bypasses, and overrides on safety-critical systems, with approval workflows, time limits, and review cycles enforced by the platform
- Temporary and portable equipment — a register of all temporary equipment on the asset, from hired-in lifting equipment through to portable electrical tools, with inspection status, location, and expiry dates tracked in one place
Critically, Serica needed these functions to work together. A safety override raised during a shift should appear in the handover. An operational assurance action raised from an event should link back to the event that generated it. Temporary equipment installed in connection with a work scope should be visible to the control room. The previous system did not support these connections — each function operated in relative isolation.
The migration approach
Moving from a live operational system on an operating asset requires careful planning. Serica and Elisian structured the migration to minimise disruption to operations while ensuring that no historical data or open items were lost in the transition.
Data migration. Open handover items, outstanding operational assurance actions, active safety overrides, and the current temporary equipment register were all migrated from the legacy system into Elisian's product set before go-live. Teams did not face the risk of a hard cutover that left them without access to items that were still live and open.
Configuration to Serica's procedures. The Elisian modules were configured to reflect Serica's operational management system — their override approval hierarchy, their operational assurance action categories, their temporary equipment inspection frequencies, and their handover structure. The platform was introduced as the mechanism for executing Serica's procedures, not a replacement for them.
Phased go-live. The rollout was sequenced to allow teams to build familiarity with the new platform before the legacy system was stood down. Parallel running for a defined period gave operations teams confidence that the Elisian solution was capturing everything correctly before the transition was completed.
Handovers and events: from log to managed record
The handover and event function was where the day-to-day operational improvement was most immediately felt. The legacy system had provided a log — a chronological record of what had happened and what was being handed over. The Elisian solution provided something more: a managed record where open items had owners, priorities, and statuses, and where nothing could be lost between shifts because the system tracked items until they were formally closed.
Event categorisation allowed the operations team to filter and search the event history in ways the legacy system had not supported — pulling all events linked to a specific system, a specific location, or a specific category over any time period, without manual searching through chronological logs. For post-incident review and root cause analysis, the ability to reconstruct the event history around an incident quickly and accurately was a significant practical improvement.
The integration between events and operational assurance actions meant that where an event generated a follow-up action, the link between them was recorded and maintained. Closing an event did not close the action — the action remained open and tracked in the operational assurance register until it was formally completed and signed off.
Safety overrides: from register to controlled workflow
The safety override register was one of the highest-value modules in the migration. On any operating offshore asset, the management of inhibits, bypasses, and overrides on safety-critical systems — fire and gas detectors, ESD systems, safety valves — is a core element of the safety case. The regulator expects to see that overrides are raised for a defined reason, approved by the appropriate authority, time-limited, reviewed regularly, and closed out when the justification no longer exists.
The legacy system had a register, but enforcement of the process was dependent on individual discipline rather than system control. In the Elisian solution, the override workflow enforces approval requirements before an override can be made active, sets the review cycle automatically based on the override type, and flags overrides that are approaching their review date or have exceeded their approved duration. The area authority and the Offshore Installation Manager have a live view of every active override on the asset at all times, without needing to query the system.
For Serica's operations leadership, the shift from a record of what overrides existed to a controlled workflow that managed the full override lifecycle was one of the clearest demonstrations of what platform consolidation could achieve.
Temporary and portable equipment: closing a common audit gap
Temporary and portable equipment management is an area that consistently generates findings in OPITO and regulatory audits — not because operators are unaware of its importance, but because it is genuinely difficult to manage well on a busy operating asset using separate registers and manual inspection tracking.
Equipment arrives on the asset, gets deployed, and can remain in use — and in some cases in place — beyond its approved period if the register is not actively managed. Inspection certificates expire without a systematic trigger to prompt renewal. Equipment from multiple contractors is tracked in multiple places, or not tracked consistently at all.
The Elisian solution consolidated Serica's temporary equipment register into a single platform with automated alerting on inspection expiry, approved duration, and location verification. Every piece of temporary equipment on the asset — from hired-in pumps and compressors to portable electrical tools and temporary hoses — is registered on arrival, assigned an approved period and inspection schedule, and tracked until it is removed from the asset and the register is formally closed out.
The result was a register that the asset team could stand behind in an audit without preparation — because it reflected the actual state of equipment on the asset in real time rather than as a periodic snapshot.
The value of a single platform
The individual improvements in each functional area were significant. But the broader value of the migration was the consolidation itself. Operations teams work in a single platform. The control room has a single view. Audit evidence — for handovers, actions, overrides, and equipment — comes from a single system with a single audit trail. Training new personnel covers one platform, not four.
For Serica, a business that continues to grow and acquire, the ability to onboard new assets onto a consistent, proven operational management platform is a practical advantage that compounds over time. Each new asset that joins the portfolio can be configured and live on Elisian platform quickly, with the operational team following a process they already know.
Find out more
Elisian's platform covers the full range of operational assurance and safety management functions for offshore and onshore energy assets. If you are reviewing your operational management tools and want to understand what consolidation onto a single platform could deliver for your business, speak to the Elisian team.