(51c) Enabling Better Day to Day Process Safety Risk Decision Making By Linking Asset Integrity Risk and Work Management Risk

Lowering and more effectively managing operational risk is a big challenge in process industries. Often organizations struggle with the tension of maintaining production whilst being able to properly maintain and repair their equipment. Daily judgement calls are made on production and risk which can result in an unnecessary sacrifice of one or the other e.g. increased safety risks in pursuit of higher production attainment or lower productivity levels for a safer environment. Lower productivity over time compromises our ability to properly inspect and maintain our safety critical equipment resulting in increased risk factors. The relationships are complex yet our workforce have few tools to help make these calls instead relying on their experience and judgement.

Risks are often managed in separate silos and while many organizations have expended significant effort to improve their understanding of overall risks on their plants, a number of key challenges remain.

• The ability to understand that Asset Integrity Risk and Work Management risk impact each other
• The ability to consistently and automatically generate reliable operational risk data
• Tools to move an organization from an understanding of risk to proactively managing risk 
• An understanding of the impact of the “work risk” upon impairments to our independent protection layers
• The ability to consistently manage the compounded risk from the combination of Asset Integrity Risk and Task Hazard Risk
• Bringing order to the complexity of managing operational risk to improve frontline operational decision making

This paper will discuss how technology can be used to dynamically capture, visualize and manage operational risk in real time on our plants in order to improve decision making on daily work activities.  By understanding the status of safety critical equipment/ independent protection layer (IPL) impairments on our plants and the impact of the current or planned workload on those impairments, we can link asset integrity risk with work risk.  Consistent data generation provides us with the risk profiles of the compounded risk of doing work against a backdrop of dynamic plant conditions in specific areas of the plant thus improving frontline decision making

With a holistic understanding of total risk (integrity risk, work risk and other forms of risk such as environmental, drilling etc...), frontline management teams can better prioritise and optimize work and mitigate operational risk. Frontline workers are empowered and more confident to proactively manage risks by their ability to view risks in time, space and geographically. Senior managers can even begin to understand the drivers of risk, capturing key trends from the intelligent data that will enable better decision making, continuous improvements and more sustainable performance.

Technology can empower and enable the workforce and management to proactively identify, track, monitor and manage the health of their independent protection layers and the impact of workload in real time to ensure and improve overall plant health, integrity, safety and efficiency.