I was catching up on my RSS feeds over our middle of the week U.S. Independence Day holiday. My RSS search feed on the IEC 61511 global safety standard (ISA 84.01 in the U.S.) turned up this press release on a DVD set released by the Safety Users Group. They describe the purpose of this production:
In the style of a documentary, this unique DVD will provide you with expert points of view, as well as specific concepts, definitions, experiences, examples, analysis and results from 11 world-renowned professionals in the safety industry. These experts are designers, manufacturing leaders, engineering companies, integrators, standards members, professors, legal council and TÜV certified Functional Safety experts.
Emerson’s Thomas Steiner is one of the safety experts interviewed. He is one of a large number of Emerson certified functional safety experts (CFSE) and certified functional safety professionals (CFSP). The mission of this certification process as stated on the CFSE.org site:
The CFSE (Certified Functional Safety Expert) concept was originally developed by TÜV and exida with the support of other international safety experts to ensure that personnel performing SIS lifecycle activities are competent as required by the IEC 61508, 61511, and 62061 standards.
Thomas discusses some of the basic terminology from the standards such as safe failure fractions (SFF), safety requirement specifications (SRS), and safety integrity levels (SIL) in a very understandable way. He describes how it applies to process manufacturers in applying this standard. You can see his entire interview (16:54) on the EasyDeltaV.com web site.
Overall, there is quite a bit of safety expertise provided by the 11 participants on this two-DVD set. The cost is $115 (USD) and you can get a preview by viewing this trailer of the type of information presented.
If your responsibilities include the IEC 61511 safety lifecycle and you need a good primer or refresher from knowledgeable safety experts, consider this DVD set as one of your learning resources.
