Are Your Procedures and Operators in Sync?

The process industries have utilized procedures for many decades.  Many plants still use paper-based procedures or the digital equivalent.  Often, the procedures have not been kept up to date or, even if they have, operators can miss or forget steps in the procedure that may result in an incident.  It’s widely assumed that automation will eliminate the need for some of these operator-oriented procedures in favor of fully automated processes.  In reality, statistics show that there are still opportunities for human error to cause incidents and production failures and even major accidents.

Outdated or Rarely Used Manual Procedures Can Lead to Human Error

Statistics show that 45 percent of all abnormal incidents are caused directly by human error.  In addition, if you include human causes related to the other two factors – premature equipment failure or production upsets – the total impact of human error would be closer to 65 to 70 percent.

Tehcnology and standards such as ISA106 and ISA88 have advanced to the point whereby automated procedures are possible in most process plants that have control systems running the process.  However, it is important to strike the right balance between operator responsibilities and what an automated procedure can do.  The best combination seems to be ones that allow the operator to stay focused on running the plant, while the automated procedure attends to procedure details that are easy to miss.

If you are interested in the topic of procedural automation, ARC is currently running a survey here.  This survey is being conducted to evaluate the various levels of procedural automation which are currently deployed in the process industries.