Shifting safety from cost to value

In today’s business and regulatory environment, controlling a refinery or other high-hazard processing plant is increasingly demanding. Not only are business variables and costs, for example the cost of energy, fluctuating almost minute to minute, stricter health and safety regulations mean companies face extraordinary fines and potential reputational damage if an incident occurs. This is causing industry leaders to prioritize safety’s place in the profit equation of their business. For process manufacturers to succeed in an increasingly competitive market, while also complying with ever-more-stringent process safety regulations, they must stop thinking about process safety as merely a cost center and reimagine it as a profit center.

The good news is that by leveraging digitization, analytics and other IIoT-enabled technology advancements, refiners can create a closed-loop safety model that accurately monitors gaps in the integrity and performance of their operations, allowing them to avoid potential incidents before they occur. In short, business and operations leaders should rethink how their safety systems, software and solutions can improve the safety of their people, processes and assets while measurably improving the bottom line.

Safety – the new profit center ?

Traditionally, process safety and profitability have been diametrically opposed concepts. Since a process manufacturer’s primary business objective is to create profits, protecting the safety of the plant’s people, assets and environment is a necessity to operate and often seen as a necessary cost of doing business. But the fact is, better understanding and controlling process safety risks enables a more profitable operation because it also helps control downtime (efficiency), maintenance (reliability) and other business risks.

The key to controlling risks to the safety, efficiency, reliability and profitability of the operation is to accurately measure the performance of every piece of equipment, process unit, plant area and plant in real time. With the emergence of IIoT technologies, now is the time to capitalize.

First, modern industrial control and safety instrumented systems are more powerful, faster and more secure than ever. Even though safety instrumented systems would never be connected to the internet, they can still leverage plant connectivity to quickly gather and analyze data, which means they’re able to help plant personnel make rapid, highly accurate operating and business decisions in real time. Such capabilities not only help the workforce mitigate operating risks and improve safety performance through the avoidance of near misses and unexpected outages, it helps them understand the plant’s safety threshold so they can maximize the profitability of their operations.

While preventing incidents is always the most critical priority, leaders should also consider how their safety systems and processes can help them avoid unplanned downtime, reduce scheduled outages and increase efficiencies in other areas.

For example, using digital testing safety applications to automate the safety system testing for a boiler upgrade project, an oil and gas company reduced factory acceptance testing time by 50 percent and site acceptance testing by 85 percent, which gained them four extra days of production. That equates to an additional 1.2 million of production. At an estimated $50 per barrel, it comes to approximately $60 million in gained revenue.

Second, when plant personnel are better able to identify, plan and manage operating and business risks, they not only reduce the likelihood of unexpected production outages and downtime, they also have greater control over operational profitability. For example, IIoT-driven algorithms, such as dynamic performance measures, can be configured to identify looming threats to equipment and safety, which allows operators to act before an incident occurs. This empowers the workforce to control operating and business risks in real time. This continuous, closed-loop approach to safety helps drive measurable improvements to operational profitability.

Digitizing safety to improve operational profitability

Today’s safety instrumented systems can still leverage the benefits of IIoT-enabled operating environments without being connected to the outside world. For example, many plants that have undertaken a digital journey are using cheaper, readily available sensors and connectivity to bring assets and people more closely together through the transference of better of operating data.

When the right people have the right data at the right time and in the right format, they are far better able to improve the safety of their process and operations in real time. That’s because all this data, especially the rich data within the safety systems, allows operators to analyze safety events so they can more strongly assess the current state of their operations, as well as apply actionable insights to identify potential and even prevent incidents.

By digitizing safety design data and assumptions into a digital database on the front end, safety-critical information becomes useable, quick-to-find and easy-to-use. Actionable data and information from disparate systems across an operation can be used to create meaningful analytics to find and compare historical conditions and performance patterns. With these insights, operators can prevent unsafe conditions before they occur, meaning both plant downtime and time spent on maintenance is decreased. Cloud technologies, which also reduce deployment costs, can also be considered for use as a central rallying point to help the workforce, regardless of location, improve decision making, drive collaboration (by breaking down organizational silos) and increase access to critical data, metrics and reports.

Implementing a digital initiative, as well as establishing ongoing, real-time measures and key performance indicators, can enable companies to better understand their safety threshold, reduce their operating risks and improve the real-time performance of their assets and asset sets across a plant. Not only will that reduce and prevent costly downtime, it will also help them constantly improve the profitability of their operations. In fact, according to The Aberdeen Group, companies that combine safety management systems with analytics have, on average, nine percent higher operating margins compared to those without them. Moving safety from a cost center to a profit center

With the right tools and technologies, moving safety from a cost center to a profit center can be a reality. It requires a delicate balance between increasing performance and production and minimizing human error, but continuous, closed-loop control helps manage that balance. It enables companies to stop managing operating and business risks and begin predicting and controlling them in real time.

Using new, more powerful safety systems, software applications and other digital tools, industrial manufacturers can accurately predict when their operations will exceed accepted safety thresholds, thereby avoiding incidents before they happen and maximizing performance and productivity.

Making operations safer, more reliable, more efficient and more sustainable allows companies to keep pace with stricter health and safety regulations and faster business cycles. But just as importantly, it enables them to drive measurable improvements to their bottom line. That is the promise of profitable safety.?