What makes an industry leader?
At INTEGRA, we believe it takes decades of expertise, an innovative mindset, and a solid track record — not to mention a consistent focus on and commitment to our “why.”
For more than 30 years, our expert team has developed and delivered faster, better and safer solutions to ensure joint and mechanical integrity of systems in the energy industry across North America.
We do it by delivering certainty of outcome to customers — resulting in zero defects, zero delays, and zero accidents.
Our “why”
Put simply, INTEGRA’s raison d’être is to ensure the safety and reliability of the energy infrastructure (oil and gas production, pipelines, refining, petrochemical and power) that is so critical to our society.
INTEGRA was born out of a personal experience our president and CEO Gordon Britton had in the 1980s.
Gordon was working at a refinery in Toronto when the plant suffered a leak, resulting in a fire and a series of explosions, and devastating one of the company’s critical process units.
Thankfully, nobody was hurt. But the event made a lasting impression on Gordon: hitting home the criticality of the oil and gas industry, the risks involved in managing such operations and the potential for real catastrophe.
In the wake of the plant explosion, Gordon took on a project engineer role — and learned the causes of the fire, how to rebuild the plant, and how to prevent such instances in the future.
Those learnings are what led him to create INTEGRA Technologies.
A serious industry
Our society depends on the energy industry operating safely and reliably.
Certainly, risk is everywhere; any place you look, there is potential for risk. However, while the likelihood of a defect, leak or accident is low, when they do occur it results in catastrophe and seriously affects society’s reliance on energy.
Consider the impact on:
- Employees. An accident can dramatically affect your employees’ health, and even lead to fatality. The ripple effect can alter many aspects of a family’s life forever. At INTEGRA, we believe in and are committed to ensuring every employee goes home as safe and healthy as they were when they first got to work.
- Facility. Consider leaks, maintenance costs, project creep, and the devastating impact of a fire or explosion. In the last year alone, there have been at least three major explosions affecting plant production in North America (in Philadelphia, New Brunswick, Texas).
- Society. There isn’t a single thing in this world that is not affected somehow by the energy industry. Food. Computers. Transportation. Communications. Cutting-edge medical equipment. Not to mention the means to develop toys, household products, heavy-duty industrial goods, and fertilizers. According to the International Human Resources Development Corporation, the oil and gas sector alone powers the world’s seven billion people with 60% of their daily energy needs. Indeed, without access to energy, our society would cease to function properly.
There are so many moving parts that go into ensuring a safe, reliable energy infrastructure. The challenge for energy companies — especially those in oil and gas — is ensuring they have not overlooked even the smallest of things that could lead to the most disastrous of events.
Peace of mind through industry leadership
This industry is full of so many what-ifs — it’s enough to keep you awake at night, every night.
So how do you achieve a safe and reliable infrastructure? You do so by ensuring attention to the finest details, so things are done right the first time. The stakes are just too high otherwise.
That’s where INTEGRA comes in. We are driven every day by our why as well as our core values of integrity, respect, safety, commitment and quality.
That means we:
- Ensure industry-leading processes and technology are always put in place for our customers;
- Hire the very best subject matter experts and skilled specialists in our field; and
- Mandate ongoing training.
We do so with the goal of decreasing the likelihood of risk while also increasing certainty of outcome.
There is a saying that the true test of leadership is how well you function in a crisis. At INTEGRA, we beg to differ. Real leadership — especially in our industry — is about preventing a crisis well before it occurs.
By providing advanced technology and services, we do just that: making our customers’ worlds more predictable in terms of safety and reliability, and empowering them to focus on increasing productivity and profitability so they can sleep better at night.
Stay tuned for our next blog, where we will share more about our commitment to COO (certainty of outcome) for our customers.
