Refining Editing and Proofreading Services

At six in the morning, twelve people hand a refinery to twelve other people. Something is not quite right on the crude unit, a pump was swapped overnight, a valve is chained open for a reason somebody explained at two a.m., and a contractor is coming at eight for a job the outgoing shift agreed to and the incoming shift has never heard of. Most process incidents have a shift change somewhere in the twenty-four hours before them.

We edit what refineries and process plants produce — shift handover records and formats, operating procedures and job aids, temporary operating instructions and their expiry, permit to work documentation, isolation and lock-out procedures, unit start-up and shutdown procedures, turnaround work packages and scope documentation, alarm and trip override documentation, incident and near miss reporting, management of change documentation, environmental and emissions reporting, and contractor briefing material. Our editors work on the record that carries a plant across a shift boundary.

The shift handover record is the highest-frequency safety-critical document on a refinery, and its weakness is that it records status rather than intent. A handover listing tank levels and unit rates transfers data that the incoming shift could read from a screen, and omits everything they could not. We work through these so the record leads with what has changed and what is not normal, since normality is the default the incoming shift assumes and every deviation from it has to be stated explicitly; so anything temporary is recorded with why it exists, who authorised it and when it expires, because a chained valve or an overridden trip is safe while it is understood and dangerous the moment it becomes furniture; so work in progress is recorded with what state the equipment is actually in rather than with what job is being done, given that a pump described as "under maintenance" tells the incoming operator nothing about whether it is isolated, drained or reassembled; so anything expected during the coming shift is listed with its time and who is coming; so unresolved concerns are recorded even where nothing was done about them, as the outgoing operator's unease is information; and so the handover is signed by both parties as a conversation that happened rather than a form that was completed. Handovers written this way carry what the screens cannot.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including procedures, plant records and incident documentation. We are editors rather than process safety or operations specialists, and we offer no view on procedures, plant status or safe systems of work. What we can do is make the handover transfer what the incoming shift could not find out alone.