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When you are responsible for the permitting and safety of a plant, your number one priority is risk management. However, if you don’t have the correct processes in place, your job can quickly turn into crisis management.
At Prometheus Group, we identified that the best way for our clients to get ahead of safety issues is to start with barrier management, which is why we acquired RiskPoynt to add it to our suite of services.
RiskPoynt is a barrier management software that enables users to track the effectiveness of their safety measures to increase the safety of their facility.
Adding RiskPoynt into our Prometheus Permitting and Safety suite now allows us to provide even more comprehensive safety solutions to our clients.
Continue reading to learn more about RiskPoynt’s barrier management functionality and how it can help you manage your company’s risk.
The History of RiskPoynt and Risk Management
RiskPoynt was created alongside industry standards such as IOGP-544 EU and UK offshore safety directives that deal with MAH (major accident hazard) prevention. The main goal of RiskPoynt is to prevent major accidents by forming a common understanding of the operational risks operators are exposed to at each site.
In the past three decades, barrier management has evolved significantly. Key incidents such as Piper Alpha, Longford, and Macondo led regulators like BSEE, EU, and UK HSE to work with operators and industry bodies such as API, UKOOA, and IOGP to establish reinforced safety solutions.
Using a barrier management approach allows companies to maintain their efficiency, reliability, and cost effectiveness while ensuring safe production.
Barrier Management involves awareness from a technical (plant) perspective, operational management (processes) perspective, and a human (people) perspective. All major accidents can be traced back to the failure in one of those three things.
Elements of The RiskPoynt Barrier Management Solution
RiskPoynt is designed to house your entire portfolio of assets all in one system. To help you manage your risk, the solution takes a comprehensive approach and accounts for each risk management factor, including:
1. Process Safety Issues (PS)
The failure of a barrier to meet the specified Performance Standard may be disclosed by planned assurance activities (testing) or by an actual demand on the barrier (shutdown event). Other examples are impairments, overrides, or inhibits – all may cause the barrier to fail in meeting the standard and therefore increases the risk.
2. Deferment of Safety Critical Work (DF)
Inspection, testing and maintenance activities provide assurance of barrier effectiveness (in accordance with defined Performance Standards criteria). All backlog (deferral) of planned assurance activities on barriers should be considered in the barrier Risk Assessment.
3. Operational Risks (OP)
A Risk Assessment (often called Operational Risk Assessments – ORAs) should be performed to assess the risks where the operations of the plant and or processes are not in accordance with the design intent. If required, additional risk mitigation measures will need to be put in place during the period that any non-standard operation is taking place.
4. Human Factors (HF)
Human Factors include the availability of competent personnel in key positions, the suitability of processes that could cause an additional safety risk if performed incorrectly, the competency of emergency response teams, and the potential for procedures to be misinterpreted.
5. Safety Critical Element Condition (SCE)
This information is fast moving, automatic and sourced electronically from your enterprise systems. Monitoring of SCEs involves a combination of PI/DCS (plant information systems/ distributed control systems) identifying degraded equipment, work management locating emergency breakdowns, maintenance identifying past due preventative and corrective maintenance, and operations identifying overdue change operations. These will give you a clear line of sight to issues out in the field.
By taking these factors into account, our functional consultants will be able to help you create a risk management picture for all of your assets in RiskPoynt.
4 Functionalities to Support Your Risk Management Goals
1. Monitor Mitigation Measures
RiskPoynt enables you to set mitigation measures for all the assets in your portfolio. For each asset, you will be able to view mitigation streams and dig deeper into each barrier to check the status of it to receive a detailed explanation of what issues may be occurring.
You should be able to review the risk of each of your assets on a day-to-day basis, especially when your business revolves around complex processes or dangerous machines. If you miss an issue with your barrier management in these types of environments, it could turn out catastrophic.
2. Sustain Production Levels
When you monitor the safety of your assets, you are also gaining a better understanding of what preventative maintenance your assets need to keep operating safely and at maximum efficiency. With effectively managed assets, you will be able to easily sustain the production levels of your plant.
Mismanaged assets result in more maintenance time, higher failure rates, and more incidents. Not only does this affect production rates, this can also lead to more devastating issues that can affect the entire operation of your site. RiskPoynt helps you prevent this, by allowing you to manage the safety of each of your assets.
3. Create Accountably
As we mentioned above, there are many factors that go into risk management. Issues in your facility will usually be caught by a sensor or a person. To ensure that your facility’s risk management is effective, you will need to set processes in place to account for each stage of barrier management.
RiskPoynt allows you to take all these factors into account and track them in a transparent dashboard which incorporates both the operations-friendly barrier model (“Am I safe to operate today?”) and the more complex “Bow Tie Model,” which can be used to analyze and demonstrate relationships in high-risk scenarios (for example Loss of Containment due to Hydrocarbons Under Pressure).
The system will trigger approval and safety reviews for each stage to make sure that issues are being addressed properly. When breakdowns of barrier management occur, your team will be able to identify where the issue is originating. This will allow you to discuss the problem and come up with a solution to fortify that stage of your safety management.
4. Improve Overall Safety
To foster an environment of safety, it is critical that you have a complete picture of your risk management stages and processes. This high-level overview will help you determine what steps need to be taken to improve your safety and the status of it over time.
RiskPoynt collects the data to provide you with reports on how your risk management is tracking. With these reports, you can provide proof to regulators and insurance companies on how you are keeping your site safe and compliant.
Use RiskPoynt to Improve Your Barrier Management
Take control of your risk management by using RiskPoynt to manage your mitigation measures, increase your production levels, create accountability, and improve your facility’s safety.
By using the barrier management system, you will no longer have to worry about finding the underlying cause of reoccurring issues through exhaustive investigation. Instead, you will have access to all the data you need, directly at your fingertips.
Reach out to us today to learn more about our barrier management solution, or request a demo to see how the RiskPoynt system could work for you.
