A Word from the Boss

Providing essential assurance solutions

Welcome to our Autumn newsletter for 2023!

In this edition, we are thrilled to share Beach Energy’s Stakeholder Management client success story journey over the last two and half years, welcome back two Wantoks who have recently returned from maternity leave, present another X-InFocus tech tip and update of our teams’ activities in connecting people with information.

To open I would like to recognise how excited we are to have Aleksandra Hillier (Senior Solution Specialist) and Mia Slattery (Administration Coordinator) back with us from maternity leave and the energy they bring to the team. We understand that the transition back to work after a period away can be challenging, but we want to assure you that we are here to support you every step of the way. It also gives me great pleasure to welcome our most recent new clients PIE Solutions, Plummers Industries and RREDD to the extended Mipela family.

It has been an exhilarating start to 2023 with some big projects successfully delivered, our Kamapim continuous improvement process carries on with this year’s focus on the theme of the three C’s (Communicate, Collaborate, Change), numerous APGA events across several states (so good to be able to see people in person again) including our sustained sponsorship of the New Zealand Seminar and Golf Day in New Plymouth. Our digital Transformation Stage continues with the mobilisation phase of our new Modern Hosted Platform completed in February we are now well underway with the migration targeted for completion at the end of May positioning us with the most up-to date secure, resilient and efficient platform for the X-Info suite of solutions.

From all the team at Mipela GeoSolutions, stay safe!

Hayden McDonald
Founder and Managing Director

Reporting Stakeholder Information to the Regulators

Beach Energy is an ASX listed, oil and natural gas, exploration and production company headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia. Founded in 1961, Beach have operated and non-operated, onshore and offshore, oil and natural gas production from five producing basins across Australia and New Zealand.

Beach recognises its intrinsic role in supporting communities, by actively contributing to sustainable environments and the health, safety and wellbeing of the people living in the areas where it operates. Its community investment strategy focuses on three key areas; education, environment and health, safety and wellbeing.

Beach’s community relations team were looking for a way to capture, manage and measure its stakeholder management to gain a better level of understanding of stakeholder communications across the business. Enter Stage Left – Mipela. The team from Mipela have worked with the Beach team to deliver a stakeholder management solution to assist them with community engagement and consultation processes, with consideration made to land access requirements.

As part of the consultative process, it was also identified that the following functionality could be included in the proposed solution, using X-Info Suite:

• Stakeholder engagement including agreements, grievances, commitments, communications, records management and reporting
• Community investment and grants management including contracts, correspondence and reporting
• Landholder land access including notice of entry, payments and reports.

Both teams recognised the best way to work together was to adopt a continuous improvement approach to the solution – delivering more and more functionality as the solution matures. Whilst some enhancements have been simple configuration changes to workflows, others have been major feature developments, which are now available to other Mipela clients.

Being able to create bulk emails, correspondence and SMS messages against multiple stakeholder contacts simultaneously has demonstrated a huge amount of value to the Beach community relations team. The consistency of messaging and significant reduction in time taken to issue information means the community relations team can get on with other tasks.

“We can now quickly distribute communications to a targeted list of stakeholders and have it automatically recorded as an engagement in X-Info Suite for future reporting purposes,” said Linda French, Group Manager Social Performance and Community at Beach Energy.

Recent industry highlights of regulatory reporting compliance becoming more and more important, has lead to the development of significantly improved reporting from X-Info Suite. Being able to automatically create a report that demonstrates stakeholder engagement from both detail of each email, call, text and in a tabular engagement log summary at the push of a button has been a real advancement for Beach.

“To satisfy different regulatory requirements, we must be able to provide details of our stakeholder and landholder engagement – including extracts of all emails and summaries of engagement,” said French.

“Being able to capture, then create a report that details engagement with relevant persons from a single system like X-Info Suite is a powerful tool when you are accountable to present evidence to regulators. This engagement report has saved a phenomenal amount of manual handling. I am absolutely thrilled with this new functionality,” French added.

Both teams will continue to improve on the value that X-Info Suite delivers to Beach.

Global Excavation Safety Conference awards Australia’s Glen “Cookie” Cook as the World’s Damage Prevention Hero of the Year 2022

Earlier this year, our mate, Cookie popped into Mipela to have a yarn about what he does. He is quite honestly one of the nicest blokes you will ever meet. His passion for electrical safety is unsurpassed. So much so, he was recently crowned the world’s Damage Prevention Hero of the Year at the Global Excavation Safety Conference held in Tampa, Florida in February.

“Cookie” is a Principal Community Safety Specialist for Energy Queensland, with close to 30 years of experience working within the construction and utilities industries. Glen has shared his knowledge and passion with many Australian and international power companies. One of his biggest achievements has been his work as a driving force behind the lookupandlive.com tool, allowing workers to plan their work near powerlines in a safe manner. He is considered an expert and ambassador for powerline safety.

The Mipela team would like to congratulate Cookie on his global achievement – we knew he could do it!

Adding extra assurance to your BYD automated response system

Over the past few months, the team at Mipela have been working to increase the level of assurance of its BYD automated response system, X-Info DBYD suite (now referred to as X-Info Assurance suite).

Behind the scenes, all Mipela cloud hosted clients have been migrated from email referrals to webhook and API uploads to SmarterWX Sentinel. This increases security measures, reduces the risk associated with extra moving parts of the processing workflow and improves processing performance of incoming BYD enquiries significantly. Mipela X-Info Assurance suite clients are experiencing top ranking performance with their response processing times, with several in the top 10 responders within the nation.

Other measures recently implemented include:

• Enhanced validation of dynamic data sources such as Oracle Spatial, Esri REST, WFS and WFMS
• Validating projection libraries and dependencies for corruption and availability.

The Mipela team are committed to ensuring asset protection isn’t just about monitoring BYD requests and will continue to provide those additional levels of assurance that asset owners need in this ever changing world.