An Ounce of Prevention: Seven Steps to Safety on the Plant Floor
June is Safety Month, giving employers an opportunity to evaluate and
improve their existing safety practices. The prime concern of any
organization is the health and safety of their employees — every
responsible employer ensures that their workers are properly trained,
protective gear is worn where necessary, and proper procedures are in
place in the event of an emergency.
Knowing how to react when something goes wrong is vital, but preventing
major incidents from occurring in the first place is at the core of an
effective safety program.
Equipment or process failures can cause death or serious injury in
worst-case scenarios, but more often than not these failures are
relatively minor and only result in lost production or downtime. So when
you make safety one of your core principles, you’re not only protecting
your workers, you’re also beefing up your bottom line.
Three key factors impact the safety of your operations: process
control, equipment and people. In fact, the Abnormal
Situation Management Consortium has discovered that 22% of abnormal
situations are caused by process, 36% by equipment problems, and 42% by
people. To achieve true safety you need an integrated approach that deals
with all three. By enhancing the efficiency of your control processes,
improving operator effectiveness and minimizing equipment breakdown, you’ll
make your operations safer and more profitable.
Here are seven areas that must be addressed to create and sustain a safe
work environment:
Safety Starts with Control Systems
Step One: Monitor Control Performance for Stable Operations
Safety and efficiency are very closely linked — when your operations are
running the way they’re supposed to, you minimize the chance of a safety
incident. The first step in making your operations safer, then, is to
ensure the control processes underlying your operations are performing
at their optimum level.
Improving the stability of your control processes pays big dividends in
terms of both safety and productivity. The best part is that this step is
relatively inexpensive to accomplish, requiring no additional capital
investments or IT infrastructure. Productivity and safety benefits are
quickly realized and the return on investment is usually achieved in only a
few months with side benefits including increased throughput and yield and
improved control over product quality.
Explore solutions to allow your organization to find the hidden
efficiencies being stifled by underperforming control processes.
Step Two: Safeguard against Unauthorized Access
Now that your operations are stable and performing optimally, the next step
is to safeguard your control systems and networks against unauthorized
access or changes. Your challenge is to balance the needs for business
network visibility into control systems with the risk of increased
vulnerability to outside security breaches. And with continuing concerns
about the threat of terrorism, especially in the chemical and oil industries,
there are an increasing number of security regulations to make sure you do
protect your operations from cyber threats. While the possibility of a network
security breach producing a catastrophic event is slim, the threat is still
there, and organizations must stay vigilant.
An air-tight cyber security program protects your workers as well as the
sensitive data that is central to your operations. This topic is dealt with
in greater length in this issue of Pacesetter.
Click here to read more.
Step Three: Get to the Root Cause of Process Interruptions
Understanding exactly where and why breakdowns occur in your process gives
you the knowledge to avoid similar situations down the road. If you have the
ability to accurately diagnose the root causes of plant downtime, you’ll have
the insight you need to direct the efforts of your engineering and maintenance
teams to the areas that will have the greatest impact on your operations.
Fewer breakdowns also mean fewer potential safety incidents.
Learn how you can maximize the efficiency and safety of your operations
by identifying and eliminating the root causes of production delays and
downtime.
Equipment
Step Four: Predict & Prevent Events Before they Occur
Monitoring your assets and understanding the root causes of downtime and process
upsets lets you take the next step towards a condition-based maintenance program,
where you predict upset events in time to prevent them.
Equipment failures result in downtime and lost production, and they may also
seriously endanger the lives of your people or create an environmental risk. Many
companies rely on outdated maintenance practices, performing maintenance only in
the event of a breakdown or on a set schedule even when the equipment is working
fine.
However, today’s technology gives you the power to implement a smarter maintenance
program. A condition-based maintenance program collects data in real-time from your
plant assets and predicts when a piece of equipment is close to breakdown, allowing
it to be fixed before any downtime results.
If you haven’t already implemented condition-based maintenance in your organization,
what’s stopping you?
Begin implementing a CBM program today to cut equipment downtime
and improve the safety of your people on the plant floor.
Step Five: Monitoring Assets & Performance
The right asset monitoring solution can help you guarantee that your physical equipment
is running properly at all times.
Most plant equipment spits out huge amounts of data. Your challenge is to filter out the
unimportant information so that you can focus on the meaningful data that feeds your KPIs
and see warnings of impending failures. Effectively managing a large number of assets is
especially difficult if they are dispersed over a wide area. However, understanding the
condition of your equipment at any given time is crucial to the smooth running of your
operations.
Discover how a centralized monitoring solution
can help you keep tabs on all your assets, wherever they are.
Equipment monitoring solutions are also available
if you’re in the mining, wind farming or oil and gas industry.
Read the article in this issue of Pacesetter on equipment monitoring in the mining industry.
People
Step Six: Alarm Management Strategies for Improved Operator Effectiveness
Efficient and secure process controls and proper upkeep of plant equipment are two
important components of an effective safety program; but, the most unpredictable aspect
of safety is people. To ensure safety, we need the right strategies to assist operators
in efficiently and effectively completing their jobs. Proper training is vital, but the
right systems also need to be in place. That’s why alarm management is an indispensable
part of plant safety.
Control systems are designed to provide basic safety by setting the acceptable limits
for variables such as flow, pressure, tank level, etc. Alarms are triggered when these
limits are breached to allow operators to catch minor issues before they turn into major
problems. As operating conditions change over time, many of these "factory settings" are
no longer aligned to plant practice. This results in operators being bombarded with
hundreds of alarms every hour, making it easy for the critical alarms to get lost in
the crowd.
For an effective alarm management program, you need to slow this alarm flood to a trickle
so that operators are notified only of important events. Current guidelines, such as EEMUA
191 and ISA-18.2, recommend that a single operator should receive no more than 10-12
alarms per hour.
Find out how your organization
can meet these tough standards. When operators have the ability to act immediately on
critical alarms, incidents that slow productivity and compromise safety can be averted.
| Alarm Statistics by Industry |
EEMUA
Standard |
Oil & Gas |
Petrochemical |
Power |
Other |
| Average Alarms per Day |
144 |
1200 |
1500 |
2000 |
900 |
| Average Standing Alarms |
9 |
50 |
100 |
65 |
35 |
| Peak Alarms over 10 Minutes |
10 |
220 |
180 |
350 |
180 |
| Average Alarms per 10-Minute Interval |
1 |
6 |
9 |
8 |
5 |
| Distribution % (Low/Med/High) |
80/15/5 |
25/40/35 |
Step Seven: Manage Changes Made to Your Systems
As operating conditions and corporate mandates evolve, you make changes
to your control system configuration, alarm limits and processes.
Imagine the chaos of a change made here and there without proper
documentation and notification. A small change today could lead to big
trouble tomorrow.
The change process needs to be managed from start to finish, so that
the implications of each considered change are understood by all
stakeholders. You also need an audit trail of made changes and the ability
to validate those changes against recommended practices.
Find out how you can automate and manage your configuration changes.