This is the second post of a series of blog posts on process safety management. Click here for the first post.
Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) and Layers of Protection Analysis (LOPA) are foundational to process safety management and operational risk programs. The risks identified by these assessments determine the controls, inspections, trainings, and day-to-day operations for your organization’s processes. From these outputs, your organization is able to manage complex processes safely.
As companies around the world strive for ever-lower incident rates and ever-tighter risk tolerances, the ongoing challenge for organizations is to continuously improve process safety. Can organizations leverage their PHAs and LOPAs further for the purpose of reaching ambitious safety and risk targets?
This is, of course, a leading question: organizations can – and are – leveraging their PHAs and LOPAs to great effect. Digitalized PHAs and LOPAs share their information between different facilities: this simple act of bringing information together can standardize risk ratings, identify overlooked hazards or safeguards, and share best practices among different teams.
Digitalization is only the first step: PHAs and LOPAs should share a common asset library, controls library, and risk register with the rest of the organization. Process risks are compared against risks across the entire organization: this gives leadership the visibility required in order to make informed decisions about risk, and efforts to mitigate risk can confidently target the greatest opportunities for investment. This is another well-known benefit of digitalizing PHAs and LOPAs, and just another step in the journey of minimizing process safety risk.
The next steps in the journey are forward-looking, but are closer in the future than some may realize. Soon, information about risks and controls stored in PHAs and LOPAs will be compared against the operational status of those controls in real-time. The likelihood of a process safety event can be adjusted every minute by checking whether the expected controls are in place.
Alerts can be sent to users in the field when the risk of an event is elevated, and these users can be guided toward the process at risk and the controls that are meant to stop the event. Users can take informed action immediately.
Comparing the expected operating conditions captured in the PHA or LOPA against the actual operating conditions using data in the field will act as an always-present, real-time control against process safety events.
Enablon is poised to maintain its market lead by incorporating these next steps of the process safety journey. In one integrated ecosystem, our risk and controls libraries, real-time operational data and controls status, and expert analysis of risk through bowties and LOPAs are combined into a unique and market-leading solution.
The goal is to leverage PHA and LOPA information in new ways, to maximize their effect by minimizing event risk, and to lead innovative organizations in their journey to prevent process safety events.
