Functional Safety 2016

ABB Limited

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Tel: +44(0)1642 372000

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Registered Office:

Pavilion 9, Byland Way

3780764 England

Daresbury Park

Belasis Hall Business Park

Fax: +44(0)1642 372111

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Daresbury, Warrington

Billingham TS23 4EB

VAT Reg No:

Cheshire WA4 4BT

United Kingdom

668 1364 13

United Kingdom

This is consistent with the requirement in IEC62682 to defined safety critical alarms as ‘Highly

Managed Alarms’ (HMA). IEC62682 also defines the additional activities required for HMA, such as

periodic testing and that all alarms are to be rationalized.

However our findings shows that safety critical alarms are often not clearly identified and have no

defined response. This demonstrating that the important information recorded during the earlier

Hazard and Risk Assessments is often not passed to the subsequent functional teams.

The overall risk of a lack of an integrated collaborative approach across the organisation due to silo

behaviour can means that there is potential for hole alignment in the ‘swiss cheese’ model – if each

silo just focusses on making sure that their slice of cheese has fewer, smaller holes, but who is

accountable for making sure that small holes don’t line up?

How can the silos be broken down?

It is important to point out that removing silo behaviour, whilst vitally important, is not enough on its

own to assure good functional safety performance - that line of thinking is a good example of silo

thinking.

Accountability

Executives within major oil and gas companies are demonstrating their own accountability through

increased focus on the actual safety and operability performance of new installations. No longer is it

acceptable to just to deliver projects on time and on costs, and demonstrate the design complies with

the relavant safety standards, executives are asking for demonstration that the actual performance of

the delivered systems, meet expected performance. Key Performance Indices (KPIs) such as actual

numbers alarms per hour, compared to expected is one such example of this.

The key to achieve effective FSM is for all the different parties involved to take a collaborative

lifecycle approach, avoiding a ‘waterfall’ project style delivery, with a focus of achieving the

necessary risk reduction, while delivering the SIS which has minimium impact on the operating and

maintenance teams.