Staying Compliant With Your Safety Systems

The Process Safety Life Cycle and ANSI/ISA 61511/IEC 61511: An Overview

Champion Technology Services, Inc. understands the challenges plant managers face complying with OSHA 29 CFR 1910.119 Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals (PSM). The ANSI /ISA 61511/IEC 61511 Functional Safety standard provides PSM regulated facilities guidance toward compliance, but is not a prescriptive standard. It does not tell us what to do, nor does it require a particular level of safety for our plant. The standard does provide an objective means of measuring the current level of risk and for objectively reducing that risk. For this reason, it is considered a performance based standard.

This ANSI /ISA 61511/IEC 61511 Process Safety Life Cycle provides process manufacturers with a phased, step-by-step approach to manage process safety throughout the life of their plant. Depending on the size and complexity of the process, each phase can take months or years to complete and may involve a sizable multidisciplinary team. Project management and documentation are critical to long-term success. However, many facilities lack the in-house engineering, implementation, and maintenance resources to design, build, and maintain these systems alone. Champion Technology Services, Inc. is committed to compliance with current standards and engineering best practices to support clients in all phases of the safety life cycle.

The 3 Phases of the Safety Life Cycle

Analysis Phase

Analyze the process, document the safety hazards and the level of safety required to meet your organizations tolerable risk level. The outcome of the analysis phase is typically that a plant is able to mitigate the risk with engineering and operation improvements or that a safety instrumented system (SIS) is required. If a SIS is needed, a Safety Requirement Specification (SRS) must be developed before the Design and Implementation phase can begin. The (SRS) will document all input, output requirements, functional logic, and safety integrity level (SIL) for each safety instrumented function (SIF).

Design & Implementation Phase

Once the SRS is completed, the process of designing, engineering and selecting a safety system can begin using approved software and hardware subsystems. It is critical to ensure that the SIS is installed, commissioned, documented, and validated by qualified personnel so that it does what it is intended to do and meets the requirements of the SRS.

Operations & Maintenance Phase

Once the SIS is commissioned into service, plant operators should operate and maintain it according to the specified requirements and SIS design plan and keep all documentation current. Procedures should be in place to validate, document and report any deviation from the applied standards and the SRS. If modifications or additions to the SIS are needed or if the SIS is decommissioned, it requires re-entering the safety lifecycle at the appropriate step.

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