(47q) Graphic Visualization of IPL Status Enables Better Judgement of Inspection, Maintenance and Repair Priorities and Helps Day to Day Assessment of Operational Risk and Work Management Decisions

With hundreds and even thousands of IPL components to be inspected, maintained or repaired at a facility, monitoring and managing their status is a challenge whose difficulty rises exponentially when dealing with ageing assets.  It is not uncommon to have a situation where there is a degree of impairment on several prevention or protection systems but it is difficult to judge where the priority lies given constraints on maintenance and inspection resources. With a backlog of safety critical maintenance, dilemmas arise such as whether it is more important to action an overdue callibration on a relief valve or to inspect a set of gas detectors which should have been carried out last month. These practical day to day problems are very common in aging plants or production facilities in mature basin areas. Our maintenance management systems are excellent for setting up and managing an appropriate inspection / maintenance schedule for our critical elements but once a backlog has developed they are not so helpful in prioritising overdue work. Often the right decision is based on proximity of impairments so that you avoid a situation where multiple systems are impaired in the same location, however, the data is not configured to present in this manner.

This paper will describe these challenges and talk about new technology platforms which are now available to  help in this area. They are expansions of existing work management technology solutions where work activities are shown graphically with icons on plant plot plans. These systems can now be used to track IPL impairments graphically showing the geographical location of the impairment allowing better decisions to be made on the cumulative local effect of impairment. They also enable better decisions to be made on day to day work whose activities may have an impact on overall Operational risk based on the status of IPL's in the vicinity of the work. For example if you were about to do maintenance work offshore on a main oil pump which required breaking containment and the tools you were going to use introduced a spark potential. Added to this the deluge system in the area is 3 months beyond its inspection due date. Showing this information graphically rather than in lists and schedules enables better assimilation of the facts and more informed decision making on whether to do the work or what additional precautions to take. The paper will look at how such information is gathered and presented and we will describe some realistic scenarios showing how these systems help with prioritising inspection and maintenance work and how they help with day to day work decisions. While this expanded technology platform is new, the original work management technologies have been around for over a decade and in common use today. We will include some comments on how these systems have evolved, who uses them and how successful they have been.

The growth in this area represents a broadening of the technology tool set which can be used for a risk based approach to inspection, maintenance and repair and helps to combine and share information and data from three disparate functional groups: Operations, Maintenance and Safety whose collaboration is essential for safe and efficient running of the plant.