Many operating process facilities work around highly hazardous chemicals and are faced with having to manage their process risks using sophisticated programmable safety instrumented system (SIS). As one might expect, employing the use of such technology opens up plenty of opportunity for human error such as; incorrectly specifying the wrong technology, level of redundancy needed, as well as properly managing the entire system after installation.
Over the past several years, national and international standards that were focused on the implementation of SIS’s moved towards performance oriented, rather than prescriptive. This simply meant, that these standards didn’t mandate the type of technology, level of redundancy, or maintenance test intervals, etc., instead they described what must be done to manage your process risks to tolerable levels. This was in line with OSHA’s national legislation for the U.S. (29 CFR 1910.119) on process safety management (PSM), which states that users must ‘determine and document’ that their facilities are designed and operating in a safe manner.