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The Safety Lifecycle Manager software application, SLM, is a powerful application that allows an Enterprise, Manufacturing Site or Engineering Project to manage and fully document Process Safety information in one location. The application provides basic Safety Life Cycle functions as well as providing an extensive set of additional functionalities that a particular user may choose to use, or not.
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Digital transformation is a time to understand the potential opportunity involved in a technology investment. It’s an ideal time to ask questions, such as ‘Can we change our processes to allow for great efficiencies that potentially allow for better decision making and cost savings.’ A perfect example could be trending data to identify optimum test intervals based on degradation over time. This could provide cost savings in fewer required tests.
The key tactical benefit of digital transformation is to improve the efficiency of core business processes. In the image below, you can see the efficiencies provided by digital data broken down into three key module areas:
As you can clearly see, the opportunities provided by digitalization are vast and for this reason Digitalization Demands an Integrated Safety Lifecycle Management System A lot of tools in the market today are single purpose and do not share or exchange data in a way suited to a Safety Lifecycle Management system A lot of organizations we speak with are struggling with lagging indicators and poor reporting systems. This degradation has only gotten worse over time, and this points to a lack of clear and accurate data, overly complex workflows and restrictions brought about by company culture. At any given point in time organizations are unable to identify the current health of their plant and assets. Bad actors are exceedingly difficult to identify and experience is diminishing with retirements and a reduction in the numbers of subject matter experts. Process Safety and Functional Safety is more than just hardware, software, testing and metrics. Taking a holistic approach and instilling a culture of safety requires a complete end-to-end system that can manage from Initial Hazard Analysis to the final Operations & Maintenance. The SLM® system is the only enterprise platform proven to bring together all aspects of the Safety Lifecycle through digital transformation. Common problems
Digital Transformation Solution
Digital twins are powerful virtual representations to drive innovation and performance. Imagine it as a digital replica of your most talented product technicians with the most advanced monitoring, analytical, and predictive capabilities at their fingertips. It is estimated that companies who invest in digital twin technology will see a 30 percent improvement in cycle times of critical processes.
A digital twin captures a virtual model of an organization and helps accelerate strategy. This could be in products, operations, services, and can even help drive the innovation of new business. The model can identify elements that are hindering or enabling strategy execution and suggests specific recommendations based on embedded pattern recognition. Digital twin technology is used to collect more dots and connect them faster, so you can drive to better solutions with more confidence.
Today’s organizations are complex, evolving systems, built on the collective ambitions and talents of real people operating in a dynamic culture. The world is increasingly defined by data and machine learning, however, there is no simple way to measure human motivation or clear-cut formula for building an effective future.
In a nutshell a digital twin is a tool that can be used to analyze your business to identify potential concerns in any area, and show you how those issues link together. Armed with that information, you can build solutions immediately and overcome the most important obstacles – all before they happen. Get in touch and let our Safety LIfecycle Management tools manage your digital needs.
Digitalization Demands An Integrated Safety Lifecycle Management System (part 1) of this blog series, the general organization of the Safety Lifecycle, as described in IEC 61511, was discussed. Part 1 highlights the difficulties the application of tools typically used in the day to day operations have with effectively administrating the Safety Lifecycle.
In Part 2 of this blog series, the discussion moves on to a more detailed view of Safety Lifecycle Management for the Requirements Identification phases of the Safety Lifecycle as illustrated in the modified IEC 6111 Figure 1 below.
While IEC 61511 does not specify procedures, it does require that a hazard and risk assessment be performed and that protective functions that prevent the hazard be identified and allocated as appropriate to Safety Instrumented Functions.
In practice this is usually accomplished by performing a hazard assessment using HAZOP or similar techniques. Scenarios that have a high consequence are then further evaluated using LOPA or similar techniques.
The LOPA studies identify protective functions or design elements that prevent the consequences of the scenario from occurring. These functions and design elements are generally designated as Independent Protection Layers (IPLs) and may take the form of instrumented functions such as Alarms, BPCS and Interlock functions, Physical design elements or Safety Instrumented Functions.
The Traditional Way
The market has a number of Process Hazards Assessment (PHA) software available. However, these software tools are all focused on performing PHAs or associated studies such as LOPAs and are almost always stand-alone tools. The capabilities have generally met the needs of Process Safety Engineers yet have had their limitations. Some of the available packages have attempted to extend their functionality to other phases of the Safety Lifecycle, yet they still tend to fall short of being a complete Safety Lifecycle Management function due to their original PHA focus.
Stand Alone
The biggest issues with stand-alone PHA and LOPA software packages is the fact that they are “stand alone”. They are self-contained and some of them have such draconian licensing restrictions, that sharing of PHA and LOPA data is extremely limited and often limited to transfer of paper copies of reports. Licensing costs are extremely high which results in organizations restricting the number of licenses that are available. Usually, the PHA and LOPA data can only be accessed from a very limited number of computers (often only one or two within an organization), even in view mode.
Difficult to link PHA and LOPA
A second major issue is that it is difficult, if not impossible to link PHA and LOPA data for a series of PHA and LOPA studies done on the same process. The typical life cycle of PHA and LOPA studies is that initial studies are done during initial design of a process plant, and then a revalidation of those studies is done every 5 years. Within the 5-year cycle, multiple sub-studies may be done if there are any significant revisions done to the process.
HAZOP of Record
Larger projects may use the same HAZOP tools as used for the HAZOP of Record, but they are usually considered in complete isolation from the HAZOP of Record. Often new nodes are defined that are numbered quite differently than the HAZOP of Record and may not contain the same equipment. As many of these studies are done at an engineering contractor’s office, the same licenses may also not be used. Many smaller modifications may be made that do not use the formal PHA procedure but use perceived simpler methods such as checklists and what-if analysis. The simpler methods are usually resorted because of the extreme licensing limitations noted above.
Over a typical 5-year HAZOP cycle, a large number of additional hazard assessments are done, each independent, and often inconsistent with the HAZOP of Record. Project based HAZOPs may be performed on sections of the process with completely different node identifications and node scopes. In effect, there is no current HAZOP of Record as it is partially superseded by these incremental HAZOPs and other hazard assessment. At the time of the 5-year revalidation, integration of all of these independent studies with the prior HAZOP of Record is a major undertaking.
As these applications are stand-alone applications, any associations of Safeguards and IPLs identified during Hazard Analysis with the real Plant Assets used to implement those items must be done externally, if it is done at all. This results in a layer of documentation that is often difficult to manage, of limited availability and not very useful to the operations and maintenance personnel that really need the data
Top 3 Issues with traditional Hazard Identification methods:
Licensing restrictions often severely limit access to the data. Furthermore, personnel that need to understand the reasons for various IPLs do not have access to the necessary data.
IPLs and other Safeguards are usually identified in general terms and often do no clearly define what Plant Assets such as Alarms, BPCS Functions, Interlock Functions and Safety Instrumented Functions correspond to the identified IPLs. This is even more of a gap when a User needs to link an existing Plant Asset back to a specific IPL and PHA scenario.
There is no way to integrate HAZOP and LOPAs of Record with incremental HAZOPs, LOPAs, and MOC hazard assessments. This leads to multiple, inconsistent versions of HAZOP and LOPA which then need to be manually resolved, and often are not integrated with the HAZOPs and LOPAs of Record.
An Integrated Safety Lifecycle System, provides functionality that addresses the shortcomings of a system that is based upon single purpose HAZOP and LOPA software. Among the functions that are not provided by traditional PHA and LOPA software are:
The traditional tools used for Process Hazards Analysis severely limit access to Process Hazards data and do not support other activities required to manage the Safety Lifecycle. Process Hazards data is fragmented and requires major efforts to keep the data current.
In an integrated Safety Lifecycle Management application, HAZOP and LOPA data is readily available to any authorized User. This includes the current HAZOP and LOPAs of Record as well as a full history of prior risk assessment studies. The linking of LOPA identified IPLs to real Plant Assets allow for access of the risk assessment basis for all Plant Assets that perform IPL functions from the Plant Asset data. So an operations or maintenance user can clearly understand why various IPL functions exist and the risks that they are mitigating.
“The unique combination of Mangan Software Solutions’ industry leading technology and HIMA Paul Hildebrandt GmbH’s 110 years of globally recognized safety innovation, will enable clients to reach the next level of sustainable safety performance, enabling them to transition from thinking they are safe to knowing they are safe.” – Ronak Patel
“We are especially privileged to partner with MSS, whose digitalization solution closes the loop on managing the safety lifecycle. Our customers will now have the data to prove that they are reducing risk by the appropriate amount for the minimum capital and operating costs, and will be provided with actionable insights to optimize how they manage functional safety within their process. I am confident that, through this partnership, HIMA and MSS’ collaboration will help to optimize the safety of the process industry worldwide, both within HIMA’s installed base and for our new customers” says Jörg de la Motte, CEO at HIMA.
Process Safety and Functional Safety is more than just hardware, software, testing and metrics. Taking an overall approach and instilling a culture of safety requires a complete end-to-end system. This includes digitalized lifecycle management, from initial hazard analysis through operations & maintenance to final decommissioning.
Powered by the Safety Lifecycle Manager, HIMA is offering a holistic digitalized safety management solution. Safety related data, generated by all stages of the functional safety lifecycle, by disparate systems, is collated in one, relational platform. This facilitates the customer the ability to optimize safety performance across a plant, complete facility, or enterprise, as well as being able to demonstrate auditable, continuous compliance with the relevant standards for functional safety.
This new solution will address customer needs and concerns by providing key performance indicators and reports, giving unprecedented visibility and assurance that the process risk controls are being effectively managed before an incident occurs.
“The combined team of HIMA experts and the best-in-class SLM® platform will transform the Process Safety and Functional Safety market,” said Steve Whiteside, President of MSS. “We are proud to be a key component of HIMA’s Lifecycle Services and the Lifecycle Management Solution, which will form the foundation of digitalization safety related strategies for many organizations around the world.”
Source: www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com
ABOUT Mangan Software Solutions: MSS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mangan, Inc. that leverages technology and software services to standardize and automate business processes for the energy industry. Headquartered in Houston, with offices in Atlanta and London, MSS’ engineers and developers are experts in the fields of Safety Lifecycle Management and Safety Instrumented Systems and deploy their industry best practice flagship SLM platform suite to industries that require reliable high-performance automation solutions.