(61f) Quality Assurance and Process Safety Management

Controlling hazards associated with process equipment operation is a cradle to grave responsibility. Risk reduction strategies often rely on safety equipment to prevent catastrophic releases of highly hazardous chemicals. Safety equipment must be designed, inspected, maintained, tested, and operated in a safe manner. The burden of proof is placed squarely on the shoulders of the user to demonstrate that safety equipment is maintained such that there is a high degree of confidence that it will operate when required.

Safe operation cannot be achieved without a quality-driven process safety management (PSM) program. What constitutes a compliant program versus an effective program has been debated in numerous symposiums and standards committees. This paper foregoes these debates and focuses instead on the importance of quality assurance in achieving real risk reduction and incident prevention ? not just calculated risk reduction. It will also present a set of metrics that can be used to track and trend safety equipment performance.

Biography

Dr. Angela Summers is president of SIS-TECH, a company that specializes in the design and implementation of safety instrumented systems. Dr. Summers received the 2005 ISA Albert F. Sperry Award and the 2007 Process Automation Hall of Fame for her contributions to the field of safe automation. She is chair of the TR84.04 committee, which published guidance on the implementation of ISA 84 and was the lead technical editor of a new Center for Chemical Process Safety book, Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems.