Exploiting the potential of safety lifecycle digitalization
Author : Peter Sieber & Marco Turdo, HIMA
07 June 2024
Plant operators face a variety of challenges: Skills shortages, internationalization, operating permits and pressure to increase productivity and efficiency. A new and holistic approach to digitalizing the safety lifecycle is now opening up new potential and helping to overcome these challenges.
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In companies in the process industry, the risks posed by a process to people and the environment are determined in a risk assessment and the safety concept is regularly reviewed. Safety equipment ensures that the plant can be brought to a safe state under all foreseeable conditions – this is referred to as "functional safety" – provided that these functions are monitored.
One of the duties of plant operators in the process industry is to ensure that they comply with the relevant regulations for the operation of safety equipment at all times. This is because conformity with the regulations is a prerequisite for a plant's operating license. However, the regulations are now extremely extensive and the required processes for testing, verification and documentation are complex. A new digital approach helps keep the cost of planning, operating and lifecycle management of safety systems to a minimum.
Traditional approach leads to high efforts
This is due to the way in which functional safety has been managed to date: First, experts define the standards for processes, tools and templates. Then, the know-how on functional safety and the defined standards is transferred to the organization through extensive training activities.
In large companies, these standards, processes, tools and templates are established in as standardized a way as possible in all operations and plants around the world. In the course of this, it is also determined who is responsible for implementing the standardized processes within the framework of functional safety and the management of functional safety is applied by local groups in the plants. This starts with the risk assessment of a plant and the design of the safety functions and continues through to regular inspections and documentation. The flow of information between all these steps is usually organized manually.
This approach has a number of disadvantages. Not only is it enormously time-consuming, but it remains unclear to what extent the defined standards and procedures are actually implemented in operational practice. The gap stems from a lack of data and experiences that companies collect manually, made worse by the flow of information between implementation teams and experts usually only being at random. This creates stagnant processes for functional safety that are difficult to maintain and improve.
As a result, operators run a latent risk of non-compliance with the relevant regulations, in particular the requirements of IEC 61511. And this can have serious consequences: 80% of the causes of accidents in process industry plants can be traced back to human factors; it is therefore necessary to focus on the support processes in order to ensure safety in these plants. This is the only way to prevent errors caused by negligence or even gross negligence, which can affect the health of people, the environment and the plant.
The management of functional safety and the documentation of measures also serves to avoid criminal consequences for employees and management.
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Operating system for digital functional safety management
Digitalization offers a way out of the dilemma of achieving standards-compliant functional safety with reasonable effort.
Data from the production units is collected and compared with the unit’s design data. In this way, the validity of the operating license is automatically monitored. This procedure opens up further potential for improvement to increase safety performance and productivity. The digitalization of functional safety provides added value, and the implementation is seen as a holistic process: from engineering and operation to extensions and changes. Digitalization offers the opportunity to make the handling of safety technologies more efficient and significantly simpler for plant operators – whereby the added safety is crucial here, because in process industry plants, "Safety first!" applies.
Compared to the traditional approach described above, the digitalized SLD functional safety management process is based on a digital working environment that covers the entire lifecycle. Even the design of the safety measures takes place in a digital functional safety workspace. This holistic approach then extends to a digital training environment, and the roll-out of digitalized processes to the responsible persons and groups in the companies.
Workflows for regular tasks in the company – such as recurrent testing and inspections – are also digitized, i.e., the work steps run automatically after the manual start of the inspections and are automatically documented. The digital working environment makes it completely transparent who in the organization approved which tasks and decisions, who has completed which training courses, and where training is still required. And because data flows seamlessly in both directions – from the experts and managers to the operating and maintenance personnel and back again – it can not only be documented in a legally compliant manner, but also used for optimization projects. The "We believe we are safe" in the traditional functional safety management workflow becomes "We know we are safe."
Added value is created from digitalization in all four key areas:
- Safety and Security
- Enduring Compliance
- Streamline Engineering
- Effective Management of Change
Digitalized test procedures lead to significant savings
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Periodic testing of safety devices is an illustration of the benefits of operation in compliance with regulations. Periodic testing is used to test whether a safety device actually works when required. Traditionally, plant operators used the as-built documentation, which showed where and which tests needed to be carried out. Work orders were created in the maintenance management system and carried out by specialist personnel in the plant. For example, safety devices were bypassed, the cabling of measuring devices was disconnected, and the function of the safety devices was checked at the level of the individual components. System components such as pipes, connections and valves were checked for corrosion or leaks. Test reports were manually created for all processes and then evaluated (usually) manually by safety experts so that actions could be determined. Here, too, there were many possible errors and information was bound to be lost.
Digitalized processes, including automatic tests, not only help to eliminate errors and loss of information, but also to ensure greater safety thanks to stringent and automatic adherence to processes. In addition, there is no need to intervene in the wiring of the systems, as the necessary tests become part of the SIS functionality. In this way, for example, it is possible to automatically monitor whether the bypassing of safety devices required for online testing purposes has been reversed. The automated recording and documentation of test results significantly reduces the time and effort required for recurring tests. The digital process also enables new analysis and optimization options – for example, by automatically displaying Key Performance Indicators (process KPIs) – and ensures that a functioning feedback loop can be created from operations to the safety experts. In practice, customers report savings of up to 70%. Because the digitalized process is completely traceable, insurance companies sometimes even reward the added security with lower insurance premiums.
The next logical step is fully automated testing. For example, regular partial stroke tests make it possible to significantly extend test cycles for valves with a safety function that require a plant shutdown – and less downtime means more productivity.
In conclusion, digitalization helps designers and operators of process plants to reduce the cost of functional safety measures and increase safety at the same time. The modular nature of digitalization solutions can fit well in the creation of application-specific solutions targeted at releasing customers’ pain points or exploiting new opportunities.
About the authors:
Peter Sieber, Vice President Strategic Marketing, has been with the HIMA Group since 2014. He started as Sales Manager and was appointed Vice President Norms & Standards and Vice President Region China in 2016. Since 2022, he has been responsible for the global strategic marketing of the HIMA Group. Prior to his career at HIMA, he held various management positions at international companies. He has had a strong focus on functional safety since the late 1980s. He is actively involved in the development of international standards such as IEC 61508, IEC 61511 and IEC 62443 as well as DKE: K 232, K 931, K 914, K 941, GIZ: SINO German Standardisation.
Marco Turdo, Global Lead Consultant Digital Safety, started in HIMA in 2023 with the main responsibility of fostering and implementing HIMA strategy on Safety Lifecycle Digitalization. He worked 5 working for a major chemical company as Head of Global Functional Safety and previously as Lead Engineer on international projects for several engineering contractors in the area Instrumentation and Automation in Europe. He leveraged his expertise in developing Functional Safety Management systems for world scale organisations with a Master’s Degree in Risk and Safety Management.
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