Digitally Transforming Overall Safety

Digital Safety Transformation

Introduction

As companies in the chemical process industries pursue digital transformations, there is an increased emphasis on safety. How can digitalization benefit the many facets of safety in terms of assets, processes, and employees working on-site and remotely?

A new digital risk management methodology combines four digital technologies to form the foundation of a sustainable safety regimen. A corporate alarm philosophy with systems to effectively manage the entire alarm lifecycle is the plant’s first line of defense to maintain operations within the safety envelope. A digital, process safety lifecycle management solution provides sustainable functional safety management. It focuses on a plant’s ability to identify risks and monitor performance with real-time data to ensure there are no incorrect assumptions or additional risks that were previously invisible.

In terms of human operators, shift team effectiveness is a structured approach to transferring knowledge from one shift to the next while maintaining safe and profitable operations. Finally, consolidating these methods in a common database provides transparency to controlled work, also known as permit-to-work, which minimizes potential incidents as both internal and external field workers execute in potentially hazardous scenarios.

While companies today are running leaner, data is becoming more plentiful, sometimes to an overwhelming degree. To account for the flood of data and the need to harness its value, digital twin technology has emerged as one of the most powerful disruptive technologies in the process industries today. The entire digital risk management methodology, including alarm lifecycle management, process safety lifecycle management, shift team effectiveness, and controlled work, is implemented as a digital twin. The integration, analytics, and transparency enable the end-user to optimize safety.

Figure 1: Overall digital risk management

 

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