BLOG: Process Safety in Hazardous Industries

Process Safety is a hot topic particularly for those in hazardous industries. Regulators are united in holding businesses to account for people, plant and environmental safety.

Primarily due to well-publicized adverse events, there is increased focus on industry to ensure that not only the words are in place, but actions, traceability, and accountability is addressed at all level of the business.

There is no excuse for not knowing about events, as systems capture these in real-time. It is essential that they are addressed appropriately or the situation can arise where an external audit is commissioned after an adverse event and information is shown to be available, but was not acted upon. This can have catastrophic outcomes from the operator to the boardroom.

Industry 4.0 and the decreasing cost of IOTT sensors for vibration, heat, and pressure along with video capture are capable of providing even more context to how the plant is being managed and performing. These devices may connect directly to systems or external cloud-based databases. The result is the same. The information is there, now the challenge is to make sense of it and act upon the issues that matter whilst avoiding being drowned in data.

Dimension Software has worked with industry leaders to address these issues. Here are some of the ways we have helped:

  • Alarm KPI’s
  • Safety instrumented system validation and reporting
  • Control loop monitoring
  • Maintenance management dashboards
  • Dashboarding of data from other database systems
  • Trending, using Seeq analytics

It is clear that PI, Asset Framework, IT solutions such as Power BI and solutions by Dimension Software are able to cover this challenge.

Robert Aikman

Robert Aikman