Managing Process Safety in the Age of Digital Transformation

Abstract

Leading organizations continue to implement Process Safety Management (PSM) frameworks in an effort to reduce risk and create safe, sustainable and reliable operations. However, major incidents still occur. Even with the best PSM initiatives in place, it is difficult for organizations to understand the overall health of their assets and their process safety barriers in production operations over time. According to Petrotechnics' 2018 survey on process safety and risk management, 86% reported a gap between how process safety is intended and the reality of its implementation in operations. In 2017, an overwhelming 90% said risk awareness and safety would be improved with access to real-time process safety risk indicators - and yet the 2018 survey reveals that today 60% of companies are not proactively monitoring and managing impaired process safety barriers. An emerging category of enterprise software system for Operational Risk Management seeks to close this gap. Operational risks arise from a complicated set of interrelated parameters and are viewed and managed in differing ways depending on the role and level in the organization. The challenge these systems seek to address is to simplify this complexity using a barrier health based risk model to enable users to focus on the risk-drivers that are most important from a process safety viewpoint. This paper shares the outcomes of two projects where major operators have taken a new approach to operational risk assessment and asset integrity data to better support decision-making in relation to major hazard management.