Peer Review Process: Adding Value, Enhancing Operations and Building Collaborative Teamwork Spirit in Production Engineering

Abstract

The Peer Review (PR) concept is a widely practiced process used in various organizations all around the world, and though it is not new, it is very necessary. The Saudi Aramco - Southern Area Producing Engineering Department has taken the initiative to adopt and apply this unique concept to its organizations for more than a year. The PR process has demonstrated to improve production and cost savings/avoidance, to ensure safety issues being in compliance and most importantly, to share with and pass on knowledge among the technical workforce. The intent of this paper is to share our experience with respect to the PR process within the Production Engineering organization. This paper presents the PR processes, including its history, rationale, definition, purpose, scope, benefits, guidelines (including member's qualifications and how the PR session is conducted), flow process, structure, PR qualities and characteristics, tracking system, selection of PR projects and a number of actual case examples accomplished by the PR groups. Introduction The first question one should ask when the subject of PR comes up: What is Peer Review? Before answering that question from a professional perspective, let's view the following cartoons as shown in Figures 1, 2 and 3, in which they implicate in three separate situations and then ask ourselves a question: could these possibly represent the PR practice? The 1st picture1, shown in Figure 1, portrays a situation where the work of a scientist (person on the left) is being critically examined by his peer (person on the right). His work was found to be full of errors, unacceptable and was told to go back and re-do it. The 2nd picture1, shown in Figure 2, depicts a situation where engineer works on a project without consulting with others prior to submitting it to his supervisor for approval. The 3rd picture1, shown in Figure 3, illustrates the level of importance the peer review group (PRG) given. These situations could occur in any actual work environment, and our recommendation is to avoid all of these situations because they do NOT represent the true meaning of the PR Process. In this paper, we describe a PR process that has proven to add value, enhance operations, build collaborative teamwork spirit and has been routinely practiced in Production Engineering (PE). History and Present Day As many of us know, the PR Concept is not a new concept and, historically, we find that it has existed long before our time. We found that the 1st document of the PR process is actually dated back to the year 854–931 European Calendar in a book called Ethics of the Physician by Ishap bin Ali Al Rahwi of Al Raha, Syria about the role of the physicians. In short, the council members (or peer reviewers) had to review all of the physician's notes about his patient's visits to arbitrate whether or not he had duly performed according to the medical standards the cure or death of a patient. Legal malpractice lawsuits could be filed against him if the council members found he did not follow the standard medical practices. Today, the PR processes are being widely practiced in various institutions across the globe on issues dealing with policies and standards. Such places are in academia, business organizations, the government, and, last but not least, the Professional Engineers' Societies (for instance, in our SPE society)