1. 38 Director September 2015 September 2015 Director 39
Interview Company profile
THE MEASURE
OF SUCCESS
I
t would be all too easy to dismiss
pipelines as boring. But these
seemingly prosaic steel tubes are, in
fact, multibillion-pound geopolitical
battlegrounds (see the Russia-bypassing
pipelines transporting oil and gas from
the Caspian Sea to European consumers,
which Russia claims undermines its
influence in the region). When pipes go
wrong, the fallout can be deleterious:
affecting human lives, the environment
and the reputation of multinational
behemoths alike. Given their importance
and tendency for wonkiness – pipes are
never absolutely straight – it’s staggering
to learn many companies inspect them
using callipers, the technology of which
has scarcely changed since ancient Greece.
“If you measure a 50p piece with a pair
of callipers, it’ll tell you it’s round,” says
Denise Smiles, chief executive at Optical
Metrology Services (OMS), an Essex-based
company supplying pipe inspection and
measurement products and services to
those companies understandably nervous
about relying on callipers. “Even if it’s a
big pipe, they [callipers] won’t tell you
there’s a lump. They only measure in
eight places and are usually dependent
upon the operator… [Whereas] our tools
can take 2,000 measurements, picking up
accuracy to a fifth of a human hair.”
With delays costing some firms
$500,000 (£319,000) a day, the need to
hasten the inspection process is clear, and,
since 2006 – when OMS consisted of a
“maverick inventor” working in his garage
– this Essex-based firm has inspected and
measured pipes for the likes of Shell, BP
and Petrobras. Having measured some
500,000 pipes, OMS engineers and their
laser/camera technologies have traversed
the globe, from Angolan oilfields to
the Arabian Desert. “I would like to
think we’ve prevented big catastrophes
happening,” says Smiles. “But I don’t think
the oil and gas industries would admit it!”
Winning ticket
Smiles, one of the few senior women in
the male-dominated oil and gas industry,
has played a pivotal role in the OMS
rise. Prior to helping the company make
millions (turnover today is approaching
£7.8m, compared with £48,000 in 2006),
she saw ordinary folk win fortunes on a
weekly basis while working for National
Lottery operator Camelot. As head of
regulation and compliance, she helped
set up the South African national lottery,
where she remembers meeting the
inaugural winner: “He gave us directions
by trees,” she says. “All he wanted to
do was buy a suit – he gave most of his
money to his village.”
After taking voluntary redundancy,
Smiles – who started her “unorthodox”
career as a legal secretary – set up as a
management consultant. It was while
in this role that she received a phone
call from a client, telling her about
a “maverick inventor who needs help
with his marketing”.
The inventor was Dr Tim Clarke, an
ex-university lecturer in physics who
started a consultancy in 2000. Clarke
was producing tools from his Bishop’s
Stortford garage and he wanted help
selling them. Smiles had a different idea:
“Why would we sell to pipe mills when
we can offer a service?” Within a month,
Smiles had organised meetings with
Chevron and Shell in Houston, joining
the two-strong operation as commercial
director. “People were saying, ‘What are
you doing? Are you mad?’” she says.
The symbiosis of Clarke’s technical
genius and Smiles’ blue-chip savvy has
worked. Under Smiles’ auspices, OMS has
grown to employ 40 people at its base
near Stansted airport, which incorporates
an R&D facility, sales department and
– thanks to the 2008 acquisition of
precision manufacturing firm Thebus
Engineering – a mini-factory too. The
company also now has offices in Houston
and Rio de Janeiro, with expansion at least
partially due to Smiles’ palpable passion.
“If I can’t get something to work, I’ll
be the first person to get under the table
and fiddle with the plugs,” she says. It’s
this determination that saw her join a
two-week assignment with engineering
contractor Subsea 7 in Norway during her
first winter at the firm. “Workers generally
are rough-and-ready types working in
dangerous environments – unless you can
hold your own, they’re not interested,”
says Smiles. “Suddenly, I’m in freezing
Norway with a boiler suit, thermals and
a hard hat, operating a walkie-talkie. [The
Injustunderadecade,OpticalMetrologyServiceshasgonefromacompanycreatedinthegarageof“amaverickinventor”to
abusinesswitha£7.8mturnover.ChiefexecutiveDeniseSmilessharesatrueBritishengineeringsuccessstory
Vital stats
Founded2000
HQStansted,Essex
Staff40
Turnover£7.8m,
projectedfor2015
HighpointRecent
years–OMShasgrown
companysalesrevenues
by100percentperyear
LowpointThedeadlock
intheoilandgas
industryfollowing2010’s
BPDeepwaterHorizon
oildisaster.Smiles:
“Everythinggroundto
ahaltfortwoyears.We
carriedonworkingbut
didn’tgrow.”
Didyouknow?OMS’s
Augatoolcurrently
leasesfor£3,500aday
butthefirmhopestosell
itformorethan£3m
Words ChristianKoch Photographs GemmaDay
Smiles gets hands-on
at OMS’s Stansted
engineering division
OMS capitalises on cutting-edge tech where others use callipers

2. engineers] had previously only seen me
in a dress. They later told Tim, ‘Denise
has got the balls to handle this.’ In the oil
and gas industry, you have to muck in, roll
your sleeves up and get on with it. You
can’t be namby-pamby.”
Gadgets galore
To this day, a core OMS philosophy is
sending new recruits on foreign jobs.
Their female HR engineer has recently
returned from a fortnight working 12-
hour shifts in a Malaysian coating-yard,
while Director met a ponytailed lad in the
corridors who enthused about being sent
to Louisiana on his summer break while
fellow students “worked in WHSmith”.
At OMS’s Stansted premises, the
firm manufactures an array of gadgetry
that would make Q from James Bond
salivate. There’s the PipeChecker laser
measurement tool, capable of recording
2,000 measurements around a pipe-end in
less than 20 seconds. Inspecting offshore
pipelines has become easier thanks to the
WeldChecker, which is operated remotely
and uses high-definition digital cameras
to inspect pipes. OMS’s Pipe Straightness
Tool emits laser beams to uncover
kinks or bends. Meanwhile, its SmartFit
software can curb costs by solving the
fit-up problems that occur when pipes
of different shapes are linked together.
“Rather than discarding them for not
being round enough, we say you can
probably still use it – you just need to find
something that matches,” explains Smiles.
The game-changer in the industry was
the 2010 explosion at the BP Deepwater
Horizon rig, which cost 11 lives and
spewed 4.2 million barrels of oil into
the Gulf of Mexico. Although it initially
had an adverse effect on OMS’s business,
it also prompted greater scrutiny of
installations. “It’s made operators such
as BP, Shell and Exxon more circumspect
– they want more things inspected,” says
Smiles. “For us, it’s about educating those
companies about what is possible, letting
them know we can inspect one kilometre
down a pipe.” She attributes OMS’s
recent growth to “companies looking for
efficiencies as the price of oil goes down”.
Working in hostile conditions and
territories hasn’t been incident-free.
Two contractors once spent a day in an
Angolan jail due to visa issues, while
engineers have discovered snakes and
sleeping locals inside African pipes.
In 2011, a six-strong OMS crew was
dispatched to the far-eastern Russian
island of Sakhalin, where they needed
to complete a pipe-measurement project
in inclement conditions before the
ocean froze in November. At one point
they had to hide from a tornado, and
they measured offshore pipes while
whales darted around them. Their only
entertainment for the two-month posting
was “watching the same black-and-white
film over again on the ship television”.
Although the majority of OMS’s work is
with oil and gas companies, the firm also
assessed the Mercedes F1 team’s exhaust
pipes, inspected pipes for Crossrail and
made products for British Aerospace. It
also found itself hauled into a bizarre
court case, when razor manufacturer
Wilkinson Sword sued Gillette over its
“best a man can get” slogan. Acting as
expert witnesses, OMS measured 24
hours of beard growth. The conclusion?
Gillette’s boast was correct.
Youth recruits
Smiles is passionate about identifying
new engineering talent at a time of a
global recruitment crisis in oil and gas
(according to EngineeringUK, the sector
will need 2.2 million new recruits over the
next decade). “Engineering is not a sexy
subject at school, but there are so many
interesting aspects,” she says. “Five miles
beneath the seabed, you’ve got remote-
operated vehicles repairing welds. They
employ people to operate those robots.
You have children on PlayStations who’d
love that, but don’t even hear about it.”
Smiles is particularly proud that the
new version of OMS’s Auga – which she
believes is “the first [tool] in the world
that can reach one kilometre down a
pipe” – was designed by OMS engineer
Jack Parlane, who joined as a graduate.
Meanwhile, she buzzes with excitement
that a female A-level student has just
requested work experience there. Indeed,
the lack of women in the industry is a
bugbear – the UK has the fewest female
engineers anywhere in Europe. “I still get
clients saying, ‘You’re sending a woman?’”
Smiles says, incredulously.
As OMS continues to invent products
(approximately £1m is invested in R&D),
the company also faces challenges. As
the oil and gas industry plumbs ever-
greater depths for energy, environmental
concerns could thwart progress. OMS
recently worked on a sensitive coral-
strewn escarpment in Australia, which
meant “we had to get the pipeline design
just right”. Smiles also admits many
countries slow work down by insisting
OMS employs local workers. “Kazakhstan
was a sharp learning curve,” notes Smiles.
“They require 70 per cent local content.
It’s difficult when you’re dealing with
a country where people don’t have the
expertise with leading-edge technology.
We’re now doing training courses there.”
But OMS’s work hasn’t gone
unnoticed, with the company picking
up two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise
(apparently HM spoke “intelligently
about accuracy and environmental
problems”) and Smiles being awarded
with Professional Woman of the Year
2014 by US organisation National
Association of Professional Women. And
with competition largely limited to those
“people with callipers”, Smiles’ turnover
target of £10m next year looks like
being no pipe dream.
@omsmeasure
DeniseSmilesisamemberofIoDEssex
I’m in freezing Norway with a boiler suit, thermals and
a hard hat – in the oil and gas industry, you have to
muck in, roll your sleeves up and get on with it”
TofindoutmoreaboutOpticalMetrologyServices,visit
omsmeasure.com
Interview Company profile
An OMS engineer
measuring pipe-end
dimensions
40 Director September 2015