Safety on a Larger Scale

 Summary

Honeywell Process Solutions recently briefed ARC Advisory Group on the company's Integrated Protective Solutions offerings. Over the years, the company acquired and developed a wide array of safety-related businesses and technologies. The company has consolidated these offerings to better meet the various end user needs within the process industries.

Honeywell executives provided ARC an overview of the breadth of the company's relatively comprehensive portfolio.

Key takeaways from this briefing include:

• Honeywell has created an integrated and holistic approach to protect the plant, people, and environment to either avoid or enable faster and better response to abnormal situations.
• The related portfolio encompasses solutions for safety shutdown, process fire & gas detection, physical security, cybersecurity, and effective alarm management.
• The solutions integrate with the DCS and operations' alarm management strategies.

Why Integrated Protective Solutions?

According to Honeywell, the company assembled this collection of offerings to address several needs in the market. What seems to be the most pressing market need is to create a safer and more secure environment with increased layers of protection. End users also need to be able to make quicker, more accurate decisions; reduce operational and capital expenditures; troubleshoot incidents faster; and integrate data easier. Honeywell believes that this set of solutions will help end users better address these issues.

Fire and Gas

Honeywell's fire and gas solutions leverage offerings from company's Life Safety, Building Solutions, and Process Solutions groups. End users have been moving the functionality of traditional fire and gas systems into process safety hardware and Honeywell has worked with these users to integrate fire and gas solutions into the Experion PKS.

Honeywell's fire and gas solution isn't limited to just using its Safety Manager for fire and gas logic. The company also offers dedicated fire and gas systems (generally under the Notifier brand), suppression systems, fire and gas sensors, wire and cable, mass notification solutions, and the associated application services. These solutions are designed to continuously monitor heat, smoke, and toxic/combustible gas levels within plants and provide early warning of an abnormal situation before it becomes a hazard. This helps end users reduce insurance premiums; comply with safety standards and regulations; reduce risk; improve operational performance and lifecycle sustainability; and protect personnel, assets, and the environment.

Personnel Safety and Industrial Security

Another set of offerings involves integration and synergy with other divisions. Honeywell offers end users solutions for personnel access management, perimeter intrusion detection, lighting, workforce and visitor management, solutions specific to remote assets, intelligent video surveillance, and associated consultative services. The modular solutions support health, safety, and environmental (HSE) stewardship at the site, enterprise, and corporate levels. These solutions are designed to enhance personnel safety and track worker exposure using wireless gas detection with location identification. According to the company, this helps reduce insurance premiums through enterprise-wide compliance monitoring, tracking, and visibility; improve profitability and productivity through automated gas detection fleet management and reporting; and prevent incidents through 24/7 real-time monitoring.

Process Safety

Most end users are aware of Honeywell's process safety offering. The Safety Manager is integrated into the Experion PKS and offers a SIL 3 platform "out-of-the-box." The immediate value is to detect potentially dangerous conditions, shutdown automatically and safely, and provide root-cause analysis. Honeywell has continued to invest and innovate its process safety offering, by adding features like universal I/O, HART protocol support, and the Field Device Unit. However, the full solution offering also includes consultative services to assess process risks with competent and qualified functional safety-certified personnel. In this manner, the company aims to improve end users' safety environment, reduce the time it take to troubleshoot incidents, and integrate data easier.

Bringing It Together

Honeywell executives explained that the company interconnects and unifies the three major components within its plant safety offering using wireless networking solutions, alarm management solutions, and cybersecurity solutions.

Alarm Management

Honeywell's DynAMo Alarm Suite connects to any control or supervisory system to enable operators by providing more effective alarm management. The company's experts can deliver alarm improvement services to assess and rationalize alarm systems to help assure they perform optimally. Proper alarm management can reduce incidents and their severity. It can reduce "run to fail" maintenance by improving equipment service factors and reliability. It also provides pertinent, timely information so operators can make quicker, more accurate decisions.

OneWireless

According to the company, OneWireless Solutions allow end users to manage all wireless communication in one system that complies with global standards. It is scalable, delivers near real-time performance, and features end-to-end redundancy. Honeywell estimates that using OneWireless can reduce project cost on average by 50 percent and reduce project execution times by up to 80 percent. ARC was told that wireless applications help reduce process safety incidents by up to 70 percent and unplanned downtime by up to 80 percent. Honeywell also offers consulting services to design the most effective wireless infrastructure, and provides wireless network access points, transmitters, and portable gas detectors. The solutions also support personnel location awareness to enhance personnel safety.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity solutions protect the availability, safety, and reliability of industrial facilities, critical infrastructure and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Honeywell designed its solution to defend against emerging cybersecurity threats specific to industrial automation, establish secure connections between plant networks and the IT network, and ensure ongoing awareness of new vulnerabilities and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). The solution is also designed to provide timely response to, and fast recovery from, cyber incidents and meet regulatory compliance requirements. The solutions consists of professional field services, managed cybersecurity services, cybersecurity software, and integrate partner technologies.

Project Execution

Honeywell's portfolio of safety and security products can be integrated to reduce the amount of hardware and proprietary protocols. The company staffs its regional project centers with subject matter experts on safety, F&G, security, etc., allowing it to take on large complex projects. Functional safety-certified engineers are available to support compliance with both international standards local regulatory codes. Honeywell's LEAP (Lean Execution of Automation Projects) approach reduces system design engineering and FAT. The methodologies leverage I/O virtualization to test logic offline without a full system of hardware.

Conclusion

ARC was given an overview of the breadth of the company's portfolio and found the scope quite encompassing. Relatively few competitive offerings can rival the array of solutions brought together by Honeywell. The biggest benefit to end users is the single-source supplier aspect, which should help reduce both internal and external costs and eliminate the potential for finger pointing between different suppliers. Another benefit is the integration or unification of these systems through the Experion architecture. Safety has been an area in which end users continue to invest, regardless of market dynamics. The ability to address these needs for less cost should be attractive.

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Keywords: Safety, Protection, Integrated Protective Solutions, Fire and Gas, Personal Safety, Industrial Security, Process Safety, Alarm Management, Wireless Technology, Cybersecurity, Project Execution, Honeywell Process Solutions, ARC Advisory Group.