(57bt) Combating Audit Fatigue with Safeguard Analytics

Many companies build comprehensive Safety Critical Equipment (SCE) lists that document all important safeguards/ IPLs that are mechanized/ automated. These items are all important and protect facilities from having unsafe days but the sheer quantity can be overwhelming even for the best mechanical/ asset integrity programs. They also fail to capture the administrative controls that may be considered as risk reduction in PHAs and risk assessments. Now imagine you’re an auditor coming to site and you have 1,000 items on the SCE list that you’ve been tasked with auditing. It’s an impossibility to do them all so where do you focus? Where do you start?

Audit fatigue can be a major obstacle and when going to site to look at safeguards it can be extremely challenging to get the support needed from site personnel, given they have to deal with EPA, OSHA inspections and many other internal assessments and audits. It’s no wonder they see audits as a continual stream of interruptions. Given the likely potential for lack of support and the reams of information that needs to be reviewed it’s really ‘auditor’s luck’ to find the items that require the most attention.

This talk will include a case study and will suggest an approach using algorithms to determine and analyze safeguard criticality. This analysis helps to focus auditing activity on the most important items both equipment related and administrative. In the case study, which was completed on a real, operating facility the results show that more than 37% of the most critical safeguards were found to be out of service for a variety of reasons. The out of service safeguards include those determined to be in the top 15 most important. Audit criteria will also be shared with reference to technical guidance from CCPS documentation and other sources of reliability criteria

Visual tools from the case study will be shown as a way to help engage the site resources who are involved and who provide critical support for an effective audit. These audit team members are often ‘voluntold’ and are being pulled from regular duty to help in the audit effort. Showing them how the process is being optimized and why certain pieces of equipment or procedures are being assessed helps them to understand and increases the likelihood they’ll be willing collaborators.

Knowing if important safeguards are in place and effective, as is normally assumed, is the first step towards operating safely, following RAGAGEP and complying with industry regulation.