Do You Feel Lucky? or Do You Want to Identify and Manage Safety - Critical Equipment?

Today’s process safety practices are invariably the result of hard lessons learned by industry from major accidents.  Process safety management systems are generally credited with reducing major accident risk in process industry operations.  The prevention and mitigation of major accidents relies upon appropriate layers of protection or barriers working on demand.  These barriers include:

• Plant                Hardware, such as process equipment, control systems, dikes, etc.

• Process            Administrative and procedural controls

• People             Competent workforce, supervision, communication, etc.

The most reliable of these barriers is generally Plant.  To ensure that this equipment prevents and mitigates major accidents it needs to be highly reliable.  Some companies in the process industries have started to apply criticality ranking for process safety purposes in order to identify and manage certain equipment that requires a high reliability.  The identification and management of this Safety Critical Equipment or Element (SCE) has represented a challenge to many companies.  A major issue has been an overwhelming number of SCE items, as the SCE designation has often been assigned to equipment that may not be truly safety critical.  This has culminated in a failure to perform all inspection, testing and preventive maintenance (ITPM) tasks when due.

The paper will discuss a method to identify a manageable number of SCE items, and approaches for successfully performing all ITPM tasks including those tasks for SCE.