Diagnose Fix Govern
Opportunity sits between
procedure and practice.
Everything in a high hazard operation gets drilled except the work. The procedure exists. The rehearsal does not. There is a number on your business for what that distance costs. Most boards have never had it calculated.
Procedure is what is written down: the roles, the ownership, the accountability. Practice is what happens on the ground. Merger, reorganisation, succession and asset life all pull the two further apart. We work in the distance between them.
The problem
When the organisation changes, the accountability map breaks.
The failure sits in the seams. A technical authority leaves and two roles become one. A team disappears and its workload lands nowhere. The gaps are invisible on the org chart and obvious in the backlog.
The change control closes. The org chart updates. The foundations never move. Transition plans are written for production and value, while integrity, competence and accountability are left to catch up.
Your contractors will not tell you. They deliver to expectations built on the broken foundation.
What we keep finding
Six compromises, in almost every business we open up.
These are not predictions about you. They are what we have found, repeatedly, across asset-owning businesses and the supply chains that serve them. Most of them are known internally and tolerated, because each one on its own looks like a reasonable trade.
Ownership that dissolved in a reorganisation
Two roles became one, a team was absorbed, then the risk that sat between them was never reassigned. Nobody decided to drop it. It simply stopped being anyone’s.
A supplier model that costs the owner twice
Embedded contractors delivering to expectations built on the broken baseline. They will not raise it, because the baseline is what they were asked to deliver against.
Compliance treated as the goal rather than the intent
A regime designed to make people think becomes a set of boxes that proves nothing. The paperwork is complete. The question it was written to answer stopped being asked.
Technology permanently stuck in pilot
Twins, robotics, remote inspection and analytics bought, trialled, then parked. The capability exists somewhere in the business. It is not in the workflow, so it saves nothing.
Systems that were never fully integrated
A procedure is written as a straight line. The work goes round: found, assessed, deferred, re-inspected, re-assessed, repaired, inspected again. Every turn spends time nobody counts.
The re-inspection snowball
Backlog nobody owns turns into re-inspection, which turns into more backlog. It can consume the majority of an integrity budget while every individual decision along the way looked reasonable.
We have worked all six from the inside, holding the accountability rather than advising on it. That is the difference between a consultancy that reconstructs your operation from the outside and one that has already sat in the seat.
Which of the six you actually have, plus what each is costing you, is what the Review establishes. We do not assume it.
2/3
of an integrity budget can disappear into re-inspection when nobody owns the backlog.
£2M
left on the table by a 10% inefficiency on a £20M integrity spend. Every year.
1
named owner for every risk. That is the whole standard.
Illustrative arithmetic from operator-side experience. Your numbers are the point of the Review.
What we do
Three services. One method.
The Accountability Gap Review
Who owns each risk. Who owns it after the change. Answered with evidence before a regulator, an insurer or an acquirer asks. You get the gap map, the fix list, the forward plan plus a board-ready summary.
Problem-area integrity packages
The areas nobody fully owns: pressure systems, corrosion under insulation, dead legs, small-bore tubing, relief devices, structural connections. We take one, own it end to end, signed off by a named technical authority. Your engineers get their jobs back.
Standing governance
The map stays live. Trending turns integrity data into savings you can see in your own figures. Nothing falls between seats.
How we do it
EVOLVE
The method we run with every client. It finds the distance between what the procedure says and what practice does, then closes it.
Every business has a process that is costing it and will keep costing it at the current pace. Usually it is not hidden. It is known, tolerated, owned by nobody in particular. EVOLVE finds that process, proves the cost is real rather than anecdotal, puts a name against it, streamlines it, shows the return in your own numbers, then embeds the change so it survives. Six pillars, run in order.
Evidence
Establish what is actually true, element by element. What the scheme requires against what was recorded. An assessment that reads documents and interviews people produces an opinion. Evidence reads the record.
Verify
Data gets relied on long before anyone asks whether it can be. Verify tests representativeness, coverage, competence and independence, then states plainly what can carry a decision and what cannot.
Ownership
Most delay is not technical. It sits where two organisations each assume the other has it. Ownership puts in writing who owns the finding, the standard, the decision to defer, plus what each role may decide alone.
Leverage
A procedure is written as a straight line. The work goes round. Digital twins hold the state of the asset, remote and robotic inspection cut the cost of looking, agents hold the loop. We use these in delivery and help clients get them past pilot stage. We do not sell a platform.
Value
The return is stated in your currency. Re-inspection avoided. Backlog burned down. Budget released. The cost of a derated or shut-in plant while an intervention runs. Stated before the work starts, measured after it finishes.
Embed
Work that depends on one person leaves when that person does. Embed puts the change into the workforce: competence, governance, a record that stands up to an audit, to a regulator, to the next reorganisation.
Where it helps
Anywhere a procedure governs work that somebody has to sign for. It runs inside one discipline at a time rather than across the whole business at once, which is what keeps the investment small and the return measurable.
It is the same method underneath all three services. It is also how the AI question gets answered rather than avoided. Evidence and Verify establish whether the data can carry the decision. Ownership names who signs. Leverage is where the technology earns its place.
The cost of going round again
Deferral is not free. It is just billed later, by someone else.
Every turn of the loop buys another inspection, another assessment, another decision to wait. None of it changes the condition. Meanwhile the repair gets dearer, because the thing you deferred carried on degrading. Move the slider to see what a few cycles do.
Fix it now
£18,000
Scope, mobilise, repair, close out. Once.
Cost of carrying it
£18,000
Re-inspection plus re-assessment. Buys no change.
Total, deferred route
£43,289
Carrying cost plus a repair that got dearer.
The premium you paid
£25,289
For one anomaly, on one problem area.
Cost of continuing against cost of repairing
The flat line is the decision you could have taken on day one. The curve is the one most backlogs actually take.
The hidden cost, in hours you already paid for
Re-inspection does not arrive as an invoice. It arrives as your own people, doing work that produces no change, inside an allocation that was set at the start of the year.
Against 1,800 hours allocated to the discipline for the year.
Inspection execution
864 h
Access, technician time, reporting
Engineering and sign-off
792 h
Review, re-assessment, deferral paperwork
Those hours were budgeted for planned work. Spent here, they come out of the plan, which is how a backlog that nobody owns quietly becomes a plan that nobody can deliver.
What this is built on
Repair on finding: £18,000
Re-inspection, per cycle: £4,200
Re-assessment, per cycle: £1,800
Repair cost growth, per cycle: 12 per cent
Inspection hours, per cycle: 24 h
Engineering hours, per cycle: 22 h
Items carried at once: 12
Annual allocation: 1,800 h
Every figure above is illustrative and synthetic, chosen to show the shape of the problem rather than any client position. The arithmetic is shown so you can put your own numbers against it. Establishing what those numbers actually are, on your asset, is what the Review does.
Standing governance
What it looks like when the map stays live.
Trending is not reporting. Reporting says what happened. Trending says what it is costing you, which risk has no owner, plus whether the backlog is going the right way. Pick a discipline.
Risks with a named owner
94%
The number an inspector asks for first
Time spent reactive
21%
Down from over half at the start of the year
Open backlog
148
Items carried, not items raised
Closed on first pass
87%
Fixed rather than re-inspected
Backlog against re-inspection
Backlog nobody owns turns into re-inspection. Burn one down and the other follows.
Planned against reactive
The ratio your engineers feel every week. It is also the one that frees their time.
Open items by problem area
Anything in blue has no named owner. That is the bar the whole method exists to remove.
Every figure above is illustrative and synthetic. It shows the shape of the reporting, not any client’s position. Your own numbers are what the work produces. They are yours.
AI governance and the law
The signature has not moved. The evidence behind it has.
An algorithm now sits underneath decisions your people sign. Accountability for the signature has not transferred. The legislation is catching up faster than most boards think.
AI literacy, transparency and deployer duties on high-risk systems already apply.
The EU Machinery Regulation puts machine learning into third party conformity assessment.
AI Act high-risk obligations, deferred by the Digital Omnibus. Deferred, not cancelled.
What the regulator sees
Who owns this risk. The answer should take seconds.
An inspector's first question is simple: who owns this risk. The answer should take seconds, not a working group. Our method produces the evidence a regulated business is expected to hold: a named owner for every risk, technical authority coverage that survives succession and restructuring, plus a live trail from finding to close-out.
Operators who can show that map do not fear the visit. They use it.
The method itself runs under a quality management system: documented, evidenced, corrective actions closed out. We hold our own work to the discipline we map in yours.
Who it is for
Both sides of the fence.
Asset owners and operators first. Manufacturing and machinery, food and drink, marine and shipbuilding, energy. High hazard, high commercial value, international where the legal position has to hold in more than one country.
Supply chain second: the companies who deliver inside those gaps, who need to evidence competence to the standard their client sets. The same map serves both sides of the fence.
Proof
The model is not a proposal. It is live with our anchor client in high hazard operations, from accountability mapping through problem-area delivery to dashboarded governance. It is the framework we now bring to asset owners in other sectors.
Why Integr8te
We have held the seat.
The organisations we serve are under-resourced, carrying poor workflows, short of strategy and vision in exactly the areas that leak budget. We know because we have held the seat.
Our founder owned an asset owner's risk-based inspection programme, led a class survey on a major floating asset, then went on to co-chair OEUK's Asset Integrity Technical Group alongside the HSE principal mechanical regulator. We have watched technical authority succession fail from the inside.
We are not consultants reconstructing operations from the outside. We help set the bar our clients are measured against.
Credentials
Helping shape the standards our clients must meet.
BSI Lead Auditor
ISO 9001 and ISO/IEC 42001, quality and AI management systems
Co-chair, OEUK Asset Integrity Technical Group
At the table where integrity expectations are set for one of the most heavily regulated industries there is
Energy Institute guidance contributor
Supports the writing of the guidance on the use of big data and AI in integrity data
CAA UAV Accountable Manager
Named accountability for remote inspection operations
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