Honeywell’s Plant and Personnel Safety Solutions Help Users Improve Risk Awareness and Mitigation

Summary

About a month ago, Honeywell Process Solutions announced a partnership with Wolters Kluwer.  The partnership will bring to the market solutions designed to help enterprises in asset-intensive industries improve their risk management, environmental health & safety (EH&S), and operational excellence programs.  Honeywell recently briefed ARC Advisory Group on the partnership and, more importantly, how Honeywell intends to help its customers better manage risk in day-to-day operations.

ARC believes digital transformation of key business processes will require partnerships of this nature -- partnerships between experts in what once seemed to be disparate areas.  Technology can help unite the corporate silos of expertise and produce greater value for end users, but few suppliers can meet this need alone.  Key findings from our briefing include:

• The partnership combines two companies that are leaders in different parts of the overall corporate risk profile that are endeavoring to provide a more complete, near-real-time solution for minimizing operational  risk.
• Current EHS systems are limited by the volume of data that can be typed in by busy users.
• Digitization of these processes reduces risk, improves data quality, reduces human error, increases reporting accuracy, and facilitates regulatory compliance.

Building on the Progress of the Past

Corporations have spent decades investing in ways to improve the safety of workers, the equipment, and the environment.  Due to the different knowledge sets required to address this multifaceted challenge, many companies have different departments and multiple systems tracking various aspects of this far-reaching problem.  It’s important to keep the complexity of the disparate information flows in mind, with tentacles reaching into organizations that traditionally have very little, if any, interaction. Finding pertinent information in a timely manner can seem like “herding cats.”

According to Honeywell, there are three main areas of plant and personnel safety: Personnel, Plant & Asset, and Process.  Each of these typically utilize different point solutions to manage the pieces and may not be aware of the bigger picture.  In some cases, the point solution is a pen and paper.  Others may employ spreadsheets and custom databases.  Few solutions are aware of what is happening in other related or tangential tasks.  This can, and usually does, lead  to outdated information in some of the silos. As a result, organizations experience delays in action and increases in the overall risk to safety and production due to the difficulty in understanding the overall risk profile and interaction, as well as the increased possibility that the information doesn’t propagate to the right people.

Centralized EH&S systems like Wolters Kluwer’s Enablon platform gather a lot of information in one place.  This helps bridge those silos. As an example,  digitization across the industry has generally meant that gate-entry information (who is on site) is disconnected from the information about who is qualified to be on site. At least, it has been until now. 

Are We Good?

Isolated information often amplifies several risk areas.  The most significant is personnel safety.  Here, several aspects of concern should be monitored.  Obviously, personal protective equipment (PPE) is one aspect.  Another would include training compliance to ensure the worker is properly trained for the tasks at hand.  Companies should monitor chemical exposure and proper reporting of physical safety incidents.  In the case of a fire or chemical release, companies must track the physical locations of each worker.

A second risk revolves around compliance.  Companies must maintain systems of records to ensure proper reporting of violations or to be able to prove that no violation has occurred.  This includes aspects like environmental impacts, safety system readiness, personnel training, etc.  A lack of digitized systems increases the likelihood that this risk is overlooked.  EHS regulatory authorities are complicating the issue, shifting from lagging indicators to leading indicators as better predictors of future performance.  Maintaining this type of information will require modern software architectures and technologies.

Some risks impact production and therefore profit.  Hence, board rooms need and want visibility.  While Operations “own” this risk, a significant portion of the relevant information is kept in areas outside of Operations’ immediate purview.  These include areas like human resources, EHS, Automation, and IT.   Honeywell believes that integrating the systems and creating reporting efficiencies will allow companies to improve safety, increase uptime, and be more efficient.  More importantly, the digitization and integration of this data grants companies greater confidence that they are compliant and understand their risks at any given time.

Digitization Traverses the EHS Silos and Eliminates Errors

Honeywell has offered solutions addressing many of the different aspects of plant and personnel safety.  These solutions address process safety systems and lifecycle management, control systems, small and large asset management, fire & gas systems, mobile gas detection, mobile worker, alarm management, video, and access control.  The breadth of offerings covers much of what is attributed to the field or factory floor and is what the market traditionally associates with a large automation company.  These are areas Honeywell knows well.

Wolters Kluwers’ Enablon platform brings more of the human resources, workforce management, and environmental side to the partnership.  It addresses areas like incident analysis and reporting, training, inspections, and emissions compliance.  Enablon has provided solutions for these areas since 2000 and operates globally, just like Honeywell.

According to Honeywell, the partnership brings together these two traditionally separate worlds to create an enterprise-wide single source of truth over the entire breadth of what have been isolated islands of data.  This allows end-to-end data pathways throughout the organization so pertinent information can come together and be analyzed, evaluated, and acted upon quickly. 

Conclusions

Honeywell’s Plant and Personnel Safety Solutions and its partnership with Wolters Kluwer highlight the primary benefit of industrial digital transformation: distilling the typically overwhelming amount of data into meaningful information and making it available to the right people at the right time without bounds.  It also allows end users one commercial interface to address a broad set of corporate pain points, most importantly real-time visibility into corporate risk.

This further highlights an overall industry trend of IT/OT convergence, where the technologies and skillsets between the two groups overlap and come together.  Just as this convergence is happening within manufacturing organizations, this partnership exemplifies a convergence in supplier arrangements. Data that has been siloed in departments such as HR, operations, and maintenance were further siloed by IT and OT. 

During a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) press conference in Britain concerning the Buncefield incident, Gordon MacDonald, chairman of the COMAH Competent Authority Strategic Management Group, presented three questions for companies to ask themselves.  A fourth was added based on a presentation by CCPS to the Texas A&M Instrumentation and Automation Symposium.

• Do we understand what could go wrong?
• Do we know what systems are to prevent this from happening?
• Do we have the information to assure us that these systems are working effectively?

• What is your role?

Solutions like Honeywell’s and Wolters Kluwer’s help companies answer these questions more accurately, more confidently, and at any given moment in time.

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Keywords: Safety, Digital Transformation, Honeywell, Security, Risk, Enablon, Wolters Kluwer, Industrial IoT, EH&S, Sustainability, Compliance, Digitization, ARC Advisory Group.