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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.