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Companies rely heavily on third-party contractors for hazardous work, which presents a variety of contractor management challenges, including preventing worker injuries, protecting the company’s reputation, ensuring regulatory compliance, and mitigating potential financial risk if an incident does occur.

In Part 2, we’ll review a short overview of the “Model” Plan for OQ that’s been proposed by the NYSDPS and offering some ideas for how technology and other aspects of a third-party OQ vendor’s solution can help support the types of OQ program improvements that would be required by the NYSDPS’s proposed changes.

In February 2019, the Pipeline Safety Section within the New York State Department of Public Service (NYSDPS) published an Operator Qualification White Paper advocating that, in absence of action by PHMSA at the federal level, states should be taking action to require operators to improve their OQ programs.

Establishing and maintaining a strong operator qualification (OQ) program requires key ingredients: technology to streamline OQ records verification and management, audit services that help ensure the integrity of your OQ processes and records, high-quality covered task training content, and OQ regulatory expertise.