To ensure effective collaboration with suppliers and comply with South African maintenance regulations, Sasol must share all relevant internal company standards with its suppliers and contractors during onboarding. Before implementing Internal Standards Solutions, Sasol distributed these standards packages via CDs, relying on courier services to hand-deliver the CDs. There were several issues with this method of collaboration – for instance:

• CD deliveries frequently experienced significant delays, sometimes taking weeks or even months to reach the recipient, thereby causing project delays. In one instance, a CD took as long as 18 months to reach its destination in a remote area.
• The standards on the CDs contained static pdf versions of the standards in use at the time. Consequently, if any updates were made to these standards, Sasol’s contractors and suppliers would not have access to the most current versions.
• Projects often involve both Sasol’s internal engineers and external contracted engineers, yet there was no shared platform for collaboration on internal standards development. Sasol engineers would use SharePoint, while external engineers relied on the CD versions of standards. This disjointed approach led to frustration, redundancy, miscommunication, delays, and errors.
• Both Sasol’s internal engineers and external partners needed to address technical questions related to standards and specs. Answering a query like “Is this pump size suitable for this application?” required a formal process: filling out a Technical Query form, sending it to document control, then to a subject matter expert who would answer the question and send it back to document control, and finally back to the requester. On average, each Technical Query took 2 weeks to process, with 1-2 queries submitted daily, averaging around 500 queries/year. These queries could lead to delays impacting project timelines, especially if engineers had multiple inquiries about project standards or requirements related to their project.
• Sasol engineers and external teams would manually research citations and references within the company standards. When reviewing PDFs or hard copies of Sasol Standards, they’d encounter a citation or reference and need to understand its relevance. To do so, the engineer would search for the referenced standard, find it, and read through that standard to ding the related content. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors, especially if using incorrect or outdated versions of the standards.
• Suppliers would upload content from the CD to their systems, hosting Sasol content on their private document management systems, which may lack guaranteed security measures.
• Sasol lacked visibility into how suppliers utilized content, hindering traceability on their part. Absence of traceability prevents an organization from obtaining quality certification (ISO 9001) for their processes.
• Without visibility into content usage, Sasol cannot substantiate misuse of standards in arbitration proceedings, whether by suppliers or third parties. Without visibility into standards usage, monitoring inconsistencies in engineering work becomes very difficult. With numerous suppliers operating under various company policies and processes, Sasol required a tool to empower these supplier teams and ensure consistent work.

Sasol turned to Internal Standards Solutions from Accuris.