While I’m traveling this week to attend a customer event, Emerson’s Mike Boudreaux has graciously written the following post to share the process safety-related activities that will be occurring at the upcoming Emerson Exchange in San Antonio.
Process safety is on the minds of most companies these days, from the board of directors to site managers to engineers and operators. Recent high profile process catastrophes have left everyone wondering whether their risk management programs are providing the protection that they need. Governments are responding with proactive process safety enforcement programs such as OSHA’s National Emphasis Programs (NEP) for the refining and chemical industries.
Many companies have been very proactive in developing and implementing process safety management systems that include process hazards analysis and safeguarding practices that reduce risk to a tolerable level. Some companies are still making strides in this area, but are suffering from inadequate resources and technologies to implement effective process safety programs in their facilities. For safety instrumented systems, IEC 61511 has provided a very useful functional safety management framework for the process industries, but many people are still struggling to implement the standard in a practical and efficient way.
At Emerson Exchange, we are offering a Safety Lifecycle Management technology forum with a panel of functional safety technology experts from Emerson, Exida, and Meridium. This hour-long session will be a panel discussion on safety lifecycle management technologies that address the need to better manage your safety instrumented system through the entire IEC 61511 safety lifecycle, including the analysis, implementation, and operation phases. There are significant challenges to be met in each of these phases, and the panel will be prepared to discuss this topic with audience participation. This technology forum will be offered twice during the week of Emerson Exchange. Be sure to schedule one of these sessions in your calendar:
- Monday, September 27 from 3:00 to 4:00PM CDT
- Wednesday, September 29 from 1:15 to 2:15PM CDT
Additionally, Emerson Exchange is featuring a new Meet the Experts concept that provides participants to interact with recognized experts on focused topics. Emerson’s Mike Boudreaux will be providing a 2 hour Meet the Experts session on Safety Lifecycle Management. This will be an interactive short seminar that is designed to help business leaders and managers in the process industries have a general understanding of existing industry standards and best practices for safety instrumented systems. The seminar will provide a practical overview of the safety lifecycle, including key considerations for each phase. In addition to the typical design concepts related to safety instrumented functions and safety integrity levels, important concepts such as organizational design, competency management, planning, and continuous verification will be discussed. Don’t miss the opportunity to see this focused seminar that provides clear and concise information about functional safety management.
- Friday, October 1 from 10:00AM to 12:00PM.
There will be 15 other workshop and roadmap session topics in the Safety Instrumented Systems track presented throughout the week at Emerson Exchange. These include topics presented by DeltaV SIS users and Emerson engineers on the projects they have implemented for Emergency Shutdown, Fire & Gas, and Burner Management Systems. Some of these presentations will be accompanied by demonstrations that will be shown at the Technology Exhibits on Monday through Wednesday evenings. If safety is an important topic for you and your company, make time to schedule these valuable sessions in your calendar, and be sure to see the many SIS technology exhibits from Emerson’s DeltaV SIS, Syncade, AMS Suite, Rosemount, Fisher, Micro Motion, Topworx, and ASCO that will be provided in the evenings.
Attendees to the Safety Lifecycle Management technology forum and Meet the Experts session will be provided with a free copy of Emerson’s new Safety Lifecycle Workbook. This workbook is based on Emerson’s proven experience in providing safety solutions. It complements the Emerson Exchange sessions very well, and will be an excellent resource for participants to take back to the office after the event is over.
Mike has also graciously agreed to let me stream his Meet the Experts Friday session live to make it available to those of you who can’t attend the exchange. Make sure you’re following the twitter tag, #EMRex for details on how to connect on that day.
Thanks for a great post, Mike!
