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Process safety awareness is crucial. What steps should be taken to achieve it?
MG: Indeed, awareness of process safety is crucial for the success of the topic, and this awareness must be well managed when process safety is implemented in a large company. One has to understand that process safety is not an isolated topic, and the boundaries to other business processes, e.g. health and safety or operations and maintenance, are fluent. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to bring all employees together and speak a common language. The concept of process safety, which can be quite theoretical, should be aligned with daily work of employees, these can be technicians working at the asset or managers from operations, and translated into the terminology used by employees. This enables everyone in the organisation to understand the basic process safety principles as well as objectives, and thus, process safety will not be perceived as an additional topic but as added value to daily work. Moreover, awareness of process safety is also increased when implementation does not follow a holistic approach but stays pragmatic and focuses on specific content. Within Vattenfall we started process safety implementation by following up on process safety relevant incidents and specifying the required maintenance and operational activities to keep control of the asset integrity – this was a good decision to have basic awareness of process safety.
TD: In general, it is about awareness from Management to an operational execution level, based on a common understanding what process safety is and how it can contribute to keep the right balance in performance costs and risks, when shrinking earning potential of assets with increased cost pressure on operations and maintenance.
MG: Indeed, awareness of process safety is crucial for the success of the topic, and this awareness must be well managed when process safety is implemented in a large company. One has to understand that process safety is not an isolated topic, and the boundaries to other business processes, e.g. health and safety or operations and maintenance, are fluent. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to bring all employees together and speak a common language. The concept of process safety, which can be quite theoretical, should be aligned with daily work of employees, these can be technicians working at the asset or managers from operations, and translated into the terminology used by employees. This enables everyone in the organisation to understand the basic process safety principles as well as objectives, and thus, process safety will not be perceived as an additional topic but as added value to daily work. Moreover, awareness of process safety is also increased when implementation does not follow a holistic approach but stays pragmatic and focuses on specific content. Within Vattenfall we started process safety implementation by following up on process safety relevant incidents and specifying the required maintenance and operational activities to keep control of the asset integrity – this was a good decision to have basic awareness of process safety.
TD: In general, it is about awareness from Management to an operational execution level, based on a common understanding what process safety is and how it can contribute to keep the right balance in performance costs and risks, when shrinking earning potential of assets with increased cost pressure on operations and maintenance.
Safety and cost reduction often become competing objectives. Can they be balanced without any negative consequences?
MG: The business of utilities is in a radical change. Fossil generation is transformed into renewable energy generation sources and the electricity prices in the stock market decreased by nearly 50% within the past five years. In order to compensate for these changes, cost reductions are part of our daily business, especially cost reductions in maintenance. However, safety must not be jeopardized. A basic principle to achieve this is full transparency about safety relevant maintenance and operation activities. Once maintenance and operation activities are clearly specified as being safety relevant, supplemented by the knowledge about value adding maintenance and operation activities, conscious decisions for cost reductions can be made. This results in a good balance between process safety and cost reductions,
where cost reductions are focused on non-value adding maintenance and operation activities. Identification of safety relevant maintenance and operation activities should follow a thorough risk assessment, where reliability centred maintenance analysis, failure mode effects and criticality analysis, or maintenance criticality re-assessment can be utilized.
Managing process safety risks is achievable in theory. The biggest challenge is on delivery. What can contribute to successful implementation of process safety?
TD: Taking the awareness for process safety as a basis, management must constantly follow-up on process safety in order to support its successful implementation. On the one hand, specific process safety objectives allow to stay focused and to implement process safety according to the original planning. On the other hand, regular attention to process safety on all management levels supports the on-going steering of the topic. Having process safety in a regular discussion, gives the topic importance and supports the employees in prioritising process safety as part of their daily work. Looking at the content, a successful implementation of process safety depends on having the right people at the table. The analysis of process safety incidents requires, for example, methodological knowledge about an incident analysis, whereas the execution of a risk analysis like HAZOP requires knowledge about the methodology but also a certain technical expertise. One therefore should identify the right employees in the company to successfully implement process safety. However, most of the time companies are lucky and no serious incidents happen. In order to avoid being too self-confident about this safe situation, it is helpful to bring external incidents into internal discussions. At Vattenfall we had a very good discussion and reflection about the incident that happened at BASF Germany at the end of 2016, this supported our view on the status of our process safety implementation.
MG: In our company the management attention for occupational safety in the last decade has led to significant improvement of the safety performance of Vattenfall. For process safety we foresee the same attention needed. The goal of Vattenfall is zero accidents and zero process safety accidents. Result of this management attention is to make the step from reactive to proactive prevention of accidents and incidents.
Asset integrity is an important component of Process Safety Management. What is the main challenge of managing assets?
MG: If you have an asset intensive company, like utilities, then asset management plays an important role for managing your assets. The international standard ISO 55000 provides the boundary conditions for asset management. Following this standard, the basics for asset integrity are actually in place. However, implementation of asset management is not that easy. From our point of view, the main challenges of asset management are establishing clear roles and responsibilities, implementing risk-based decision making, and following the asset management process. The risk-based decision making relies on a thorough risk assessment and this should be a central part of the asset management process, so that asset owner, asset manager, and service provider can fulfil their roles and responsibilities. In Vattenfall, our risk assessment is based on a defined risk matrix, and this is utilized in a criticality analysis per asset, followed by applying RCM, FMEA, and MCR to define required maintenance activities. This provides the basis for establishing long-term maintenance plans and maintain (achieve) asset integrity.
TD: In addition, in Vattenfall business area heat, we are making the step from focusing on the operational phase to also focus on the design phase. So, from a safe design with a hand-over to operations the guidelines are clear about what should be done from the design perspective to maintain the integrity of the asset.
What would you like to achieve by attending the 2nd Edition Process Safety Excellence conference?
TD: The Process Safety Excellence conference offers the possibility to obtain an outside in perspective and get to know the process safety approaches of various experts and companies. Thus, my objective is to get an overview about how other companies manage process safety, learn from their experiences, and become inspired by new thoughts on how to speed up process safety implementation. Moreover, I would like to meet other process safety experts at the Process Safety Excellence conference in order to have interesting discussions and enlarge my network.
MG: I agree; learn from other experiences and experts.
Ahead of the 2nd Edition Process Safety Excellence conference conference, we approached the experts from Vattenfall - Markus Göring, Risk-Based Maintenance Expert, and Ton Duijn, Director of Asset, Maintenance and Technology Management - to discuss major challenges of Process Safety Management and what it takes to achieve successful implementation of process safety. In addition, Markus and Ton offer their insights into asset management and reveal the cost and safety dilemma.
Practical Insights From:
-
Gert Van Bortel
Vice President Emergency Response
BASF, Germany -
Jan-Petter Fossum
SVP & Head of HSEQ
Yara International, Norway -
Sonia Pires
Corporate Director HSE
AkzoNobel, Netherlands -
Ole Brinck
Head of Electrical, Automation, Technical Safety and Compliance
Maersk Drilling, Denmark -
Pol Hoorelbeke
Vice President Safety Management
Total, France -
Ewa Söderberg
Global Safety Program Manager
Sandvik, Sweden
About the conference:
By attending this marcus evans event, you will be able to discuss how to redesign your overall process safety strategy with the right management and technical initiatives. You will listen to practical case studies on how to ensure the compliance of the whole plant with legislation requirements and how to manage the aging infrastructure to achieve safety of your plant. You will participate in interactive discussions on how to focus on actionable KPIs and what risk assessment methods are worth implementing. The practical insights from the world leading companies will help you establish a thought-out approach and move towards Process Safety excellence.
The 2nd Edition Process Safety Excellence conference will take place from the 25th to 26th of January 2018 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Copyright © 2017 Marcus Evans. All rights reserved.
About the speakers:
Dr.-Ing. Markus Göring
Markus works as Risk-based Maintenance Expert in Vattenfall Business Area Heat. In this position Markus is responsible for implementing process safety, introducing risk- and value-based maintenance strategies and processes, as well as driving forward digitalization topics, e.g. introduction of the Beacon technology, in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. In his area of expertise Markus is a recognized expert and regularly contributes to different conferences. Markus holds an electrical engineering degree from the Technical University in Hamburg-Harburg, this is supplemented by a MBA in Technology Management from the Northern Institute of Technology Management. He received his Doctoral Degree from the Helmut Schmidt University, University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, for the research in engineering of automation systems under consideration of temporal changes of physical structures.
Markus works as Risk-based Maintenance Expert in Vattenfall Business Area Heat. In this position Markus is responsible for implementing process safety, introducing risk- and value-based maintenance strategies and processes, as well as driving forward digitalization topics, e.g. introduction of the Beacon technology, in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. In his area of expertise Markus is a recognized expert and regularly contributes to different conferences. Markus holds an electrical engineering degree from the Technical University in Hamburg-Harburg, this is supplemented by a MBA in Technology Management from the Northern Institute of Technology Management. He received his Doctoral Degree from the Helmut Schmidt University, University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, for the research in engineering of automation systems under consideration of temporal changes of physical structures.
Ton Duijn
Ton Duijn is Director Asset Maintenance & Technology in the Vattenfall Business Area Heat. He is responsible for further development and implementation of an Asset Management process as well as for driving development in Process Safety in BA Heat. He is also Project Manager for harmonization in maintenance processes, e.g. RCM, RBM and Value Based maintenance, and responsible for execution of benchmarks in Power (& Heat) Generation plants and Heat Grid & Sales organizations and defining improvement initiatives.
Process Safety: An Overview by Vattenfall
An interview with Markus Göring and Ton Duijn from Vattenfall
Key Practical Case Studies
- BASF disclose the complete prevention chain
- Saudi Aramco develop a new probabilistic model to assess pipeline failure modes and rates
- Johnson&Jonhson reveal a “personalized” approach to HAZOP
- Vattenfall implement process safety in the daily work
- Total analyse what can be learnt from audits in the field
Markus Göring
Risk-Based Maintenance Expert
Vattenfall
Ton Duijn
Director of Asset, Maintenance and Technology Management
Vattenfall
