Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Improve Process Safety in the Chemical Industry

A typical chemical plant has around 5,000 pieces of equipment with dozens of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) manuals associated with each one. SOPs are critical for plant safety, troubleshooting, continuous improvement and compliance. However, they require a tremendous amount of time and human effort to update and maintain, and the process is prone to inconsistencies due to human error.

These factors have a direct impact on a plant’s safety. The American Chemistry Council stated that in 2023, failures related to SOPs inaccuracy ranked among the top two causes of process safety events

Chemical companies that maintain better SOPs can improve process safety. The maintenance process can be accelerated by adopting tools that use natural language processing and large language models, by:

• Using text analysis for more efficient SOPs review.
• Accept or reject recommendations for SOPs revisions.
• Auto-generate updated SOPs based on those accepted recommendations.

When human ingenuity and AI are combined, it leads to a 25% reduction in SOPs review time and a 60% improvement in review accuracy. Standardization of SOPs leads to clarity and consistency across an organization, improvement in plant safety compliance and a reduction in unscheduled downtime.

In this session you will:

• Understand how AI can contribute to improved process safety.
• See a demo of the Smart SOP Control Tower tool.
• Explore the benefits and use cases for Smart SOP Control Tower.