There is essentially No change to how we lead HAZOPs when discussing SIL; SIL is just one of the available safeguards (exsiting or future). We do not risk rank in the meetings either; qualitative judgement is as good or better than risk ranking anyway due to the extremely large standard deviations of failure rates data [...]
We do not recommend a separate SIL assessment "session," since it is already imbedded in the brainstorming during the PHA/HAZOP. In summary, we identify the need for SIF (if SIF is the right chose of protection layer for the scenario) during a PHA/HAZOP for each scenario disucssed (more than 90% of the scenarios do not [...]
A mix of voluntary reporting, with light enforcement of minimum reporting limits, has worked in a great many companies, large (50,000+ employees) and small. But there are a lot of concrete things the company has to do to achieve high rates of reporting of near misses. An achieveable target appears to be about 50 near [...]
First, note that Process Safety has been around about as long as Occupational Safety at some companies. For instance Dow Chemical and others have implemented process safety since about 1900, and Olin and Monsanto and others since the 1970s. It certainly didn't start with the BP TX city refinery accident in 2005. In fact, there [...]
Our staff has led and documented more than 10,000 PHA/HAZOPs of entire units in the past 20+ years. During those great many HAZOPs and What-Ifs and FMEA (we use various PHA methods as needed) we (the team) determine in the PHA meetings if we need a SIF and if so, what is the SIL necessary. [...]