Robust mechanical integrity programs can provide a fresh approach to process safety management and can help drive organizations toward operational excellence
Every journey begins with understanding where you are and where you want to go. And for any chemical processing plant, process safety management (PSM) is an important journey that can deliver multiple significant benefits. Yet all too often, organizations are viewing risk simply from a compliance perspective.
The journey toward operational excellence begins with a change in mindset. Shifting from a compliance perspective to seeing the true value and benefit of process safety through mechanical integrity programs can help take organizations from being in a constant “firefighting” stance to making knowledge-based and data-driven asset-management decisions.
The ideal scenario for any business in the chemical processing industries (CPI) is to know what is happening within its automated operations. Critical to this approach is the use of technology to first provide a better understanding of how equipment is operating, helping engineers to establish a knowledge-based preventative approach to their critical operating equipment.
The goal is to reduce unplanned downtime, which can have a major impact on an organization’s operational efficiency and, ultimately, can negatively impact its bottom line. Taking a data-driven approach to process safety and maintenance can help identify any assets that are “bad actors” within the business, quickly spotting where issues lie so that engineers can focus attention on addressing the most significant issues, rather than having to sift through the cause of every alarm and alert.
Reliability and safety maturity
Process safety is built on effective resource management, and a central pillar is the computerized maintenance and management system (CMMS). Much of the information needed to make better-informed decisions is indeed available to organizations today — but experience shows that while they may have the information, the vast majority of organizations are either not using it, or do not know how to best use it to their benefit to increase the reliability- and safety maturity continuum.
From a risk-analysis perspective, many organizations currently have no systems or processes in place to collate, review and determine what their data are telling them and what decisions and actions they should therefore take. This is the equivalent of driving a car with none of the warning lights working — it is only a matter of time before something goes wrong.
And most times, this is exactly what happens, resulting in frantic “firefighting” — with maintenance teams reacting to equipment problems only after they arise (Figure 1). Because this is the way they have always operated, they often don’t realize how reactive they are and they don’t measure the impact of that reactive approach from a bottom-line perspective when problems do occur.
FIGURE 1. Taking a “firefighting” approach to asset management means that actions are not taken until there is an equipment failure, leading to lost revenue, operational inefficiency and potentially catastrophic process safety risks, including loss of containment of hazardous materials, fires and more
The more unplanned work you are forced to react to, the heavier the cost incurred. This is the most inefficient and the least safe way of operating, because an organization is not planning its own work — instead, the faulty machine is dictating what is happening.
So, the question is: where to start? And the answer to that is to remember that numbers speak volumes. It is recommended to start by setting metrics — using the existing data on hand to establish a baseline picture, utilizing all the datasets to see where you are, what information you have, what it is telling you and what larger trends it might be identifying. This is the first step in the process of moving up the maturity continuum.
Everything revolves around a continual improvement wheel by utilizing technology and data to help better understand how equipment is operating. By doing so, we can start to establish a knowledge-based preventative approach to operating equipment. We want to be more efficient and reduce critical costs, such as non-contract labor, which will in turn help improve safety, reliability and efficiency.
The goal through this approach is to reduce downtime as much as possible — not only because it is expensive — it can also have a major impact on an organizations’ operational efficiency, significantly increasing safety risks.
Digital transformation
Digital transformation is enabling organizations to make better decisions around their risks, helping them to better understand where to place their focus from a maintenance and safety perspective, through effective data management.
You cannot move up the maturity continuum if you are not planning and managing your maintenance and repair schedules. The goal is for preventative maintenance to identify, mitigate and dictate actions.
A further goal is to execute a maintenance action before there is a functional failure. When you are not continuously identifying and mitigating risk, then the machine will ultimately suffer a functional failure.
This mindset is about trying to cultivate a risk-based approach where the organization is using data to look for the right things in the right place at the right time. If you cannot do this, then you cannot identify your risks properly.
Identifying risk enables an organization to place its resources in the best places. By taking a technical and systematic approach to identifying and measuring the risks, organizations can start to move forward, away from the firefighting phase.
Through digital transformation, organizations can build robust process safety and mechanical integrity programs by embracing real-time data, predictive models, data-driven tools and technologies that can assess asset life expectancy.
It helps move an organization from “we think” or “we hope” to “we know” — enabling time, effort and money to be focused precisely where it needs to be.
The path to operational excellence
There are four key phases to achieving operational excellence, which are outlined in the following sections. Organizations have to work their way through each phase in turn and ideally will not skip a phase.
Mitigation. In this stage, many organizations are in firefighting mode. They will have a repair-based asset-management approach where asset failures are expected and accepted. There can be a “we hope it doesn’t leak” approach to assets. In this phase, your people are “firefighting heroes,” reacting to problems in an environment there is limited process development to meaningfully address these problems. Systems often revolve around repair work orders from the CMMS, and there is limited use of digital technologies, as well as limited inspection and non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of asset condition.
In this phase, asset-performance management usually involves having to deal with unexpected failures with increasing frequency and severity. In this scenario, many assets within an organization are operating to failure. Equipment can quietly be eroding away until it simply fails. Such “quiet” assets can become very risky.
Compliance. The compliance stage is a time-based asset-management phase where all potential failures are treated equally. This “planned maintenance stage” is focused on trying to prevent failure, rather than simply reacting after a failure occurs. This phase will involve personnel such as inspectors and NDE subject-matter experts, and its process technologies will include the typical requirements and procedures related to inspection and NDE (Figure 2). This phase may require inspections and testing (I&T) event report files from the CMMS.
FIGURE 2. From the compliance stage onward, subject-matter experts in non-destructive evaluation and corrosion inspection are crucial to asset-management activities
From an asset-performance perspective, an organization can expect reduction in both number and severity of failures in this phase (compared to the mitigation phase), with reduced unexpected failure costs of 5–10% with increased I&T and planned downtime costs.
Risk-based optimization stage. In this phase, organizations will be more predictive in their monitoring, taking a technology-based approach to asset management. Potential failures are prioritized based on risk. At this stage, an organization understands damage mechanisms and risks, and focuses on an identified priority.
People involved with this phase will include SMEs in corrosion, inspection/NDE, the process itself and operations, using technical work processes and systems, including inspection data-management systems (IDMS) with risk-based Inspection (RBI) and condition-monitoring locations (CML) management, using technologies such as dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), Risk-based inspection (RBI) and advanced NDE.
Asset performance should include few unexpected failures that cause significant impact, since risks will be effectively managed. Unexpected failure costs can be further reduced by 30–35% due to lower I&T and planned downtime costs.
Enterprise. The enterprise-level phase involves using data to make decisions on business-based asset management. Potential failures are proactively managed to optimize ownership cost. This also helps to optimize asset costs and lifespan.
The organization will have a team of technical and business SMEs, using integrated technical and business work processes through CMMS, IDMS, periodic inspections and other business systems.
This phase will integrate concepts like integrity operating windows (IOWs) and continuous integration (CI). During this phase, the organization can take the opportunity to consider upgrading the metals used in their processes and also to install “smart” sensors and deploy advanced data analytics. There are rare, unexpected failures, with unexpected failure costs reduced by up to 50–60% with optimized I&T costs and asset life extension.
The benefits of combining process safety and asset integrity can be felt from the plant floor to the board room for organizations that shift their perspective from the view of compliance to one of process safety and asset integrity:
Preserving an organization’s right to operate — keeping regulatory impediments at bay, maintaining a positive public profile and safeguarding reputational value
Getting a return on investment — this is where operational excellence and integrity come together with the right people and investments to properly manage regulatory risk, process safety risk, enterprise risk and operational risk ■
Edited by Mary Page Bailey
Author
Clint Botard is an engineering manager for asset integrity management services at ABS Consulting ([email protected]). He is a registered professional engineer with over 25 years of experience leading and supporting various engineering, manufacturing, quality control and business operations in the oil, gas, chemical and manufacturing industries. Botard specializes in asset integrity management, risk management, independent design verification, incident investigation and root-cause analysis. He has helped numerous industry clients improve their asset integrity management programs, with a focus on preserving the right to operate and optimizing asset performance.