Why Process Safety Lifecycle Management Lags In Industry

Overview

Despite the application of a wide variety of safeguarding measures, accidents continue to occur across the process industries.  Experience gained from past accidents has led to the development of an increasing number of technical solutions.  Safety instrumented systems (SIS) represent one of the best known and widely accepted of these technical solutions, but process safety lifecycle management  continues to be a big issue in process plants.

To control the design and implementation of these technical solutions, numerous safety-related standards have emerged.  These standards consist of technology-oriented requirements defining “adequate” implementation of the designed solutions.  It’s often considered to be “good engineering practice” to comply with these standards.  Unfortunately, this did not prevent several major accidents from occurring.  Because of the continuously growing complexity of both industrial processes and the related safety instrumented systems (SIS), a new problem has surfaced: how to better manage the safety systems over time.

Process safety lifecycle management in general continues to be a big issue in process plants.  This is driven largely by the need to conform to current standards and best practices like ISA-84 and IEC61511.  The primary goal of these standards and practices is to develop a continuous improvement approach to safety system management and ease the burden on end users so they better understand the safety status of their assets and can act appropriately when needed.

Recent updates to the standards highlight the need to focus on the total safety lifecycle.  This challenges the myth that once a system is designed and commissioned, no further effort is required on the part of the end user.  To the contrary, the work has just begun and, in general, end users are poorly prepared to address the safety lifecycle to meet industry best practices.

The State of Industry

Process safety systems began as mechanical marvels, difficult to change and maintain.  They were expanded with electromechanical systems.  This increased the maintenance headache, while doing little to enhance adaptability.  While it was difficult to change the safety logic, this wasn’t often required, so the documentation generally remained current.  The introduction of the programmable logic controller (PLC) for safety applications helped address adaptability.  Suppliers also addressed the availability and reliability of these devices.  However, since it’s relatively easy for users to change PLC code, discrepancies often emerged between the implemented code and recorded documentation, creating maintenance headaches that remain today.  However, the dynamics of the system status are not isolated to the logic solver and industry is recognizing the broader scope of the problem.

In the wake of several incidents, the process industry began to look to how to best address the risk.  Standards bodies were formed and standards like IEC61151 and ISA-84 published. These standards encapsulated and formalized industry best practices and guidelines for end users.  With help from suppliers and consultants that have specialized expertise in this area, most end users have excelled at planning, designing, and implementing the required safety systems.  However, the same cannot be said for operating and maintaining these systems.

Dazed and Confused

One of the key challenges in industry today is what is effectively a “set-and-forget” mentality with regards to safety.  But safety systems are “living” entities and don’t generally age well.  There is a very solid methodology for the initial design and implementation of an overall safety system.  However, the upkeep of a safety instrumented system can be labor intensive and safety expertise is neither cheap nor easy to come by.  Complying with the ISA-84 and IEC61511 guidelines is difficult at best, and many companies continue to have differing, even conflicting views on how to implement and operate in accordance with the guidelines. 

Regardless, an enterprise cannot address issues it cannot see.  A disparate collection of offline documentation, spreadsheets, and instrument databases exacerbates the challenge users face to maintain their safety systems for optimum performance.  

Current methodologies lack adequate techniques to monitor the performance of the implemented systems based on real-world interactions.  As such, end users lack a single view to help identify shortcomings easily.  Instead, this arrangement relies on several individuals to enter and maintain the records and other individuals to pull the data together and interpret the meaning.  In the case of an audit, the reports are time consuming, tedious, and likely to contain errors.   Given the current state of the labor market, it’s often difficult to keep safety-qualified personnel at site.  This can also complicate record keeping and monitoring of the overall safety systems’ status.

Petrotechnics, a safety technology supplier, recently completed a survey of the state of process safety and risk management in the process industries.  It identifies the top two challenges for delivering effective process safety management as “developing a safety culture” and “leadership support.” Seventy percent of respondents reported a gap between how process safety management is intended to be performed and reality.  Only 6 percent indicated they were up-to-date on safety-critical maintenance.  A mere 26 percent of respondents believed they employ effective solutions for monitoring and managing cumulative operational risk.

The Art of True Safety

In 2013, American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Center for Chemical Process Safety published “Vision 2020 Process safety: The Journey Continues.” It states five tenents, which provide a “powerful framework” for attaining the industry’s vision to “value and demonstrate actionable commitment to the competencies, communication, awareness and risk preparedness that prevent, minimize and mitigate all process safety incidents.”  These five tenents are:

• A Committed Culture: in which the executives are personally involved, managers drive excellent execution every day, and all employees maintain a sense of vigilance and vulnerability.
• Vibrant Management Systems: ingrained throughout the organization.  For these to be effective, all employees must have a clear understanding of the expectations of senior management and those expectations must be documented and shared to promote safer design principles in accordance with fit-for-purpose policies and procedures.
• Disciplined Adherence to Standards: for new and existing equipment to minimize opportunities for error in design, operation, and maintenance.
• Intentional Competency Development: to ensure that all employees who impact process safety are fully capable of meeting the technical and cultural requirements for their jobs.
• Enhanced Application and Sharing of Lessons Learned: including a broad expectation and thirst for learning.  To reduce incidents, employers and employees must enthusiastically support a culture that is driven to learn from many sources, including benchmarking, near misses and incidents, and jobs done well.

Recommendations

ARC Advisory Group fully agrees that leadership and culture must change to see the AIChE’s laudable vision for process safety to become reality.  Industry is two years away from the 2020 deadline and, obviously, the survey responses are not encouraging.  Safety lifecycle management continues to be a big issue in process plants, driven largely by the need to conform to current standards and best practices, but also rooted in corporate culture.  The primary goal of safety lifecycle management is to institutionalize a continuous improvement approach to safety system management and make it easier to understand the safety status of company assets so end users can act appropriately.

The number of standards applicable to a site may vary, however, any solution chosen should support ANSI/ISA-84 and/or IEC 61508/11 at a minimum.  Organizations like NFPA and API also have standards and best practices that should be considered, but rely heavily on the ISA/IEC standards.

Any solution should be evaluated for conformance to the standards.  Many suppliers have gaps in functionality that they fill with solutions from partners.  Some have gaps they don’t fill.  In some cases, it can take a third party both to help manage the lifecycle and make sure all the required areas of functionality are covered.

Based on ARC research and analysis, we recommend the following actions for owner-operators in the process industries:

• Get Help: Safety expertise is leaving the job market at a rate faster than it is being replaced.  Unlike in years past, it no longer makes sense for most resource-constrained companies to maintain in-house expertise for specialized projects like safety system analysis and design.  To adjust to the depletion of expertise, ARC recommends that end user organizations consider developing collaborative business relationships with service companies that have the specialized expertise and proven track record in strategic pieces of parts of the process safety lifecycle management.
• Speak with Legal: If representatives from corporate legal and risk-management departments have not already spoken with the sites, these conversations must be had.  Safety policy affects everyone.  The company should have a consistent, auditable strategy implemented across the enterprise due to the delicate nature of the problem and input from legal experts is required.
• Find a Solution that is Easy to Maintain: Lifecycle management can be laborious and expensive if the tools used require a lot of manual intervention and data capture.  Even worse, this can lead to woefully inaccurate and misleading records and safety mishaps.  On-site personnel are typically spread thin, expensive, and may not have all the needed expertise.  As a result, owner-operators should seek a safety lifecycle management solution that automatically gathers information and creates easily auditable records and reports and, in this manner, provides a single (trustworthy) version of the truth. 

Process safety will be just one of the many timely topics discussed at the upcoming 25th Annual ARC Industry Forum Goes Virtual, Accelerating Digital Transformation in a Post-COVID World, February 8-11, 2021 – Online

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Keywords: SIS, Process Safety Lifecycle Management, IEC61151, ISA-84, ARC Advisory Group.