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Monitoring safety and security risks are everyday responsibilities for modern industrial facilities. With so many things that can go wrong, plant operators must take steps to digitize, integrate and automate their environmental, health and safety (EHS) ecosystem. Integrating the right safety and security solutions, is instrumental in preparing the organization to accurately identify and address critical safety risks—whenever and wherever they arise.
Background
In today’s global industrial market, investments in EHS solutions are mandatory to ensure plant assets are protected and personnel are provided a safe work environment. Industrial facilities must meet all applicable government and industry standards while maintaining continuous safety improvement.
Unfortunately, the expertise to assess vulnerabilities and mitigate known risks may not be available in-house, and current practices in this area can be inconsistent and ineffective.
Demands on Industrial Facilities
In industries such as oil & gas, petrochemicals and power generation, plants strive for peak performance while staying within safe operating boundaries. However, the lack of real-time visibility of the process, advanced analytics for data, and an automated response system makes operators vulnerable to errors, putting plant, personnel and environment at stake, not to mention reputation.
Safety and security incidents cost process plant operators $10 billion USD annually. More than $2 billion in claims are reported to insurance companies due to equipment damage, and $12 million is lost due to fires or explosions, on average, each year.
Faced with this reality, improved EHS initiatives take on critical importance. A study by LNS research shows 64% of industrial companies have either already started digitalization initiatives related to EHS, or plan to do so in the near future.
“integrating the right safety and security solutions, is instrumental in preparing the organization to accurately identify and address critical safety risks”
Strategy for Improved Safety
For industrial organizations, particularly those in fast-growing operating regions such as the Middle East, compliance is only part of the journey towards safety excellence. They must look beyond “incident numbers” and “zero accident goals” to achieve utmost safety performance in a true sense. This requires a strong commitment to:
- Establishing a culture or behavior driven from the top that shows complete support for achievable safety initiatives.
- Understanding risk management processes, procedures, and standards to identify, prioritize and mitigate risks.
- Investing in the right technologies that improve safety and productivity.
Taking an Integrated Approach
In the move to digital transformation, plant owners/operators seek to accurately capture, analyze and transmit data for greater safety and productivity across the enterprise. While digitization can help with these goals, it can be difficult for manufacturers to do on their own. One solution is to select a partner that understands the industrial paradigm and can develop a step-by-step process for digitization that involves:
- Developing a cohesive safety strategy
- Understanding safety is not a cost, but an investment that protects workers
- Knowing safety will improve productivity and streamline processes
- Allowing visibility into the safety process to make real-time decisions
- Expanding automation to drive real time deployment of policies to the work face
As a leading global industrial technology supplier, Honeywell provides plant and personnel safety solutions that digitize, integrate and automate the entire scope of industrial health and safety. The innovative, end-to-end offering includes comprehensive, integrated products for safety shutdown, fire & gas, physical/cyber security, personnel protection, and alarm/emergency response management. Honeywell’s approach enables plant operators to deploy independent, yet interrelated layers of protection to prevent, detect, and mitigate potential safety and security risks.
With Honeywell’s solutions, it is possible to tie together all aspects of safety by seamlessly connecting the safety lifecycle of the plant, personnel and process in one system, which makes for a more cohesive view of the entire safety enterprise. The use of centralized and synchronized data eliminates errors and inconsistencies for the entire manufacturing enterprise. This approach also results in higher quality performance, utilizing fewer resources to improve productivity of expensive and/or scarce design resources. Monitoring performance by using data from the historian to validate designs or flag issues offers an up-to-date real time risk dashboard.
Benefits for Plant Operators
Experience across the industrial market shows digitized safety reduces risk.In a more robust digital environment, plant operators can view safety risks in real time, allowing them to predictively identify vulnerabilities and address problems before any downtime, or incident, occurs.
A top-tier safety organization has fewer injuries, and is more productive and profitable. Such an organization experiences fewer unusual, or unwanted, shutdowns. It also implements maintenance regimens that are preventive and proactive. Digital safety solutions are a viable investment with a strong return on investment (ROI).
Overall, the benefits of digitization in plant and personnel safety include:
- Increased overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
- Lower repeat accident and injury frequency rates
- Increased situational awareness
- Improve decision-making for faster response to incidents
- Less unscheduled asset downtime
A comprehensive approach like Honeywell’s, which integrates all or portions of independent safety systems, can yield efficiency gains and operational improvement, as well as improve compliance and risk mitigation efforts across various disciplines.
Conclusion
There is little question that industrial operations are at their most productive when EHS performance is optimized. To this end, a growing number of industrial organizations have embarked on a digitization journey to address current operational demands, a constantly shifting regulatory landscape, and the emergence of new risks to plant and personnel wellbeing.
Proven suppliers like Honeywell couple best-in-class solutions with global expertise to ensure a safe and reliable path to digitization. Honeywell’s strategy, proven at industrial sites worldwide, relies on the ability to automate and seamlessly connect the entire safety lifecycle into a single, effective system that drives safety excellence.To find out more visit us at: https://hwll.co/PlantPersonnelSafety
