Performance Management and Control Problem of Gas Industry

Performance management and control has always been one of the key focus areas of any organization. Setting goals and defining yardsticks to measure them is a quintessential task that the management has to perform. Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is one of the many ways by which managers can set targets and monitor their achievement. Performance management and control standards and their measurement differ from industry to industry. Similarly, Gas industry has its own set of performance standards and indicators to show their accomplishments.

Specific Criteria for Gas Industry

With ever increasing focus on the gas industry and the entities that are involved in the business, it is becoming critical for such organizations to meet their objectives, more than ever. These objectives may be related to successfully finding new sources of gas, maintaining good relations with suppliers, delivery efficiency, EH&S initiatives, gas transmission volumes, curbing greenhouse gas emissions, waste disposal etc. The industry has its own specific criteria for dealing with the performance and management issues.

Key Challenges

The gas industry is entering a whole new era. The major challenges that pose serious challenges to the industry include growing energy demands all around the globe, sky rocketing exploration and production costs, growing trend of alternative energy sources, concerns for climatic changes worldwide and coordination of upstream and downstream activities. All this requires the gas companies to be up and delivering the best of their capabilities. They need to revamp the existing infrastructure, bring in new technologies, acquire new resources, select projects carefully, increase the efficiency of operations and remain competitive in the market place. Companies should know how to define and manage risk, project change, monitor budget allocations, and maximize resource allocation. The major hurdles in managing the performance of companies in the oil industry are their enormous sizes and scale of operations, operations spread across geographical territories, time span of the projects, the costs involved and most r ece

ntly the environmental concerns.

How KPIs Help

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators can prove considerably helpful to the managers to tackle the uphill task of managing and controlling performance related issues in the gas industry. They let the managers give quantifiable values to the parameters. Various KPIs can be as follows: length of pipelines, greenhouse gas emissions, operating costs, ES&H initiatives, outages, consumptions, costs etc. These pointers towards performance let managers control the variables to a large extent.

Conclusion

Like any other industry, it is imperative to manage the activities and operations of the gas industry. But the complex nature of the gas industry makes it very difficult to smoothly carry on the task. Integration of onshore production and offshore gas fields, vast areas of operations, existence of different schools of thoughts, exploration, research and mounting costs are the main factors that sum up to make the process difficult. However, a systematic approach and properly selected performance measures can help answer the problem of performance and control l management.