Chemical Processing - August 2007 - (Page 20) Make them more effective by providing automated procedures within control systems By Patrick Kelly, Honeywell Process Solutions MANY PROFESSIONALS MIGHT SAY THE BEST WAY to improve at any job is by learning from mistakes. However, the chemical industry can’t afford to take that approach. After all, errors at plants can cost production, revenue and even lives. There were at least six accidents at U.S. chemical facilities during a 13-month period spanning 2006 to 2007, and together they killed nine people, injured 23, destroyed two plants, damaged 90 homes, forced the evacuation of 17,000 residents, and shut down one re nery, says the Associated Press. Billions of dollars of revenue also were lost. More than 40% of all plant incidents stem from some form of human error, estimates the Abnormal Situation Management Consortium (www.asmconsortium.com), which studies the root causes of plant upsets. Because of human nature, people follow procedures — even formal ones — differently based on their experiences and intuition. This leads not only to outright errors but to variability in operations. For instance, one shift may produce a better product than another shift because some of its operators have learned a few tricks of the trade over the years. Operators frequently struggle to nd the right balance between reliable and consistent execution of procedures and plant downtime or idle production capacity. At many sites, the balance is left to the operator’s experience (supported by written checklists and best practices) and the results, predictably, can vary signi cantly. 20 • August 2007 Deviation from best practices and procedures can be costly. Common consequences include: • Inef cient procedures reduce operator ef ciency. • Extended time to execute a procedure leads to loss of production capacity. • Improper execution results in delays, equipment damage or potential safety risks. Making the situation even worse, when veteran operators retire, they too often don’t pass their knowledge along to others. So, the chemical industry faces some crucial challenges — to avoid human mistakes that can compromise safety as well as ef ciency and reliability, and to capture operators’ experience and expertise to decrease differences between shifts and ensure product consistency. Technology can help address these challenges. In particular, integrating automated procedures into a Distributed Control System (DCS) can help operators do their jobs better and thus boost a plant’s operational and nancial performance. Automated procedures New tools enable standard operating procedures and best practices to be encoded into the DCS itself — so it can deliver automated steps and instructions to operators. This allows a chemicals maker to capture best practices, ensure they’re carried out consistently, and document proper execution with all exceptions noted. And it results in speci c bene ts: www.chemicalprocessing.com http://www.asmconsortium.com http://www.chemicalprocessing.com
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