Between Technology and Provider’s Expertise, Manufacturers can Boost Safety Profile
By Gregory Hale
Manufacturers these days are working on a set of assumptions when it comes to functional safety: Workers are aging out and retiring at a fast rate, replacements are difficult to find, and demand for products is continuing to rise.
Combine those two assumptions and it is easy to see why manufacturers are scrambling for answers to solve these ever-present – and ongoing – issues.
In today’s growing digital environment, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and machine learning (ML) bring manufacturers advantages that outweigh the current manual control. Moreover, this digital movement allows for opportunities for safety services as manufacturers scream out for increased analysis of monitoring and control. While technology will conduct much of the safety leg work, people will need to fill the roles to understand, decipher, and react to relevant safety data.
Ongoing Safety Process
Additionally, safety is not a one-time purchase, it is an ongoing endeavor. That just reinforces how a services engagement can help eliminate the problem of a lack of qualified professionals by having a specialized outside third party apply their expertise and technology to allow a manufacturer to stay ahead of the game and prevent an incident.
“Being able to integrate or digitalize your safety information and then have outside people help you with it and help analyze what’s going on with what you have can help you to make improvements,” said Sheri Sammons, global functional safety director industrial automation at Schneider Electric. “Instead of having one person at the site to make sure everything is following the different rules and regulations and have the documentation they need, they can use third-party services to help them understand how they can improve. Maybe the services component can help do some gap assessments just to see where they need to make some minor adjustments to improve their safety and also improve their operations.”
In terms of improving operations, one of the issues with safety is sometimes workers feel it slows down production or they shut down when they shouldn’t, which is a problem. The reality is the issue is not why they shut down, but the fact that they shut down. By having information readily available, it is possible to start up faster and do investigations faster to better understand why an incident occurred.
Third Party Assistance
That’s one way a third party can help by having that data and then having their experts look at the data.
Additionally, from the risk assessment side, more often than not, companies do not have the bandwidth to do risk assessments, and they need external people who can conduct those projects.
“If we have people that understand the hazard assessment profile and what needs to be done, then we can add that information into other digital programs, so everything ends up combined and you start pulling together that information,” Sammons said. “When you’re looking at doing a hazard assessment and you need the data sheet for the equipment that you’re looking at, you can pull that up and have it available immediately. There are a lot of ways that third-party safety personnel can support those working at the sites. A lot of times, site personnel are doing process safety, and they have multiple things they need to be looking at, and they don’t have other resources within the site to help them.”
A safety service provider works at individual sites, but it can apply to multiple facilities as well.
“For safety and functional safety, we see the need to have the insight of what’s going on between the different sites and have that centralized data, managing data, and then being able to identify trends and bad actors and forecasting risk that might be going on in the site,” said Ahmed Elbatanony, functional safety offer manager at Schneider Electric.
To that end, what if there was too much temperature or pressure in a process? Does that mean there is a problem brewing or is the instrumentation working properly? This is where the services provider can study and review the issue.
Collect Information
“You can detail that data so you’re starting to aggregate a body of information that is perfectly useful for your plant to say, ‘Hey, you know what? We shouldn’t be using that model transmitter or doing it that way without maybe a purge or something like this, or else we are going to have frequent issues,’” said Matt Henderson, NAM Business Development Leader – Triconex Process Safety/Turbomachinery at Schneider Electric.
“At a bigger level, if you have the data in the cloud. That means somebody in a remote location watching over seven sites can monitor all those facilities and see one common dashboard of what they are collecting. They could drill down to what site’s got what. They are also able to look at the whole corporation,” Henderson added. “Are we meeting our process safety KPIs? Do we do what we say we do? What is our mean time to repair on something? Are we going over the amount of time that you should really allot for repair? Are we seeing common failures and are we addressing them? All the answers are right there in front of you.”
What really comes into play today is the technology is so solid, there could be a dwindling level of understanding risk.
“If people haven’t experienced an issue in their career, they may not understand that potential exists,” Sammons said. “Risk is a very difficult concept for a lot of people to grasp, especially when it comes to safety. That’s where the third parties have to come in. That’s where people can come in and help assess what your risk really is. I have run into that before where there’s actually a lack of realization there is a higher risk than what people think there is.”
Dangerous Environment
Along those lines, chemical plants and manufacturing plants are inherently unsafe. They are not safe processes. Furthermore, even a machine that’s running is not safe unless it has the safeguards in place to protect people.
“When I’ve been facilitating a hazard analysis with operators who are fairly new, sometimes they did not understand the potential impacts where they worked. They didn’t realize there was a potential for a toxic chemical release that could affect them, or there could be a release that could cause an explosion,” Sammons said.
Understanding a safety event often does not occur after one incident. Rather, it often occurs after a series of smaller incidents that lead to something major.
“If I have a little bit of an incident here, or risk there and I manage to handle it in the right time, I’m not going to see the big thing,” Elbatanony said. “We need to quantify the risk as much as we can by showing the numbers and showing the risk forecast. If you don’t manage this or handle that right now, we can show through a what if analysis and forecast risk. We tell them, ‘yes, if you don’t manage this right now, you’re leading into a bad catastrophic incident.’ The basis of functional safety at its core looks at probabilities and numbers.”
Staying on the awareness theme, the end user needs training to truly understand the level of risk.
Learn From History
“If you keep ignoring the small things, it might lead to big thing. We have seen all the different reports of incidents over time. That’s the same story happening and happening again, we need to educate and teach end users, and you need to be aware of what could happen,” Elbatanony said. “You can go out and buy a quality product and put this on and say, ‘I’m safe.’ But that’s a wrong concept.
“Functional safety is about a lifecycle and how you manage it,” he said. “You have to manage all the day-to-day life data coming from the system, having a digital solution telling you what’s the trend, what deviations might be happening, the small things that might be happening, to help you avoid the bigger thing.”
This is no assumption, just a fact, safety services can help everyone solve their risk to avoid any consequences.