How to Prioritize Safeguards When They Are All Critical?

With the industry norm of budget constraints and the continuous effort of trying to do more with less, the ability to correctly prioritize work has become increasingly critical. This becomes especially important when it comes to Safety Critical Equipment (SCE) and the prioritization of safeguards for maintenance. With a growing list of SCEs, the impact of incorrectly prioritizing safeguards can be significant,. This could lead to critical safeguards having delayed or missed maintenance, and in turn lead to unintended and significant risk exposure.

In order to correctly identify critical safeguards, it often requires hundreds of hours of cross-disciplinary Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Fortunately, these are the same SMEs involved in developing Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) documentation. By using PHAs as a data source, the documentation of hazardous scenarios and safeguards can used to prioritize Critical Safeguards using the following criteria:

• Likelihood of a Cause
• Severity and Tolerability of a Consequence
• PFD/Credits of Safeguards

These criteria are used to determine the risk reduction associated with each occurrence of a safeguard, and by cumulating that risk reduction, the total risk benefit of each safeguard can be determined to assist in prioritization. By having safeguard prioritization validated or foundationally based on SME approved data, the confidence in safeguard maintenance prioritization will increase and reduce the chance of missing maintenance on critical safeguards.