You want reassurance that everyone in your company knows how to conduct themselves in a safe manner. Everyone wants to be proud of the way their company operates.

• Are your safety personnel as certified as your auto mechanic?
• Do your machine operators know how their machine works?
• Does your management ignore safety programs?
• Have you had a safety incident in the past year?

Even car mechanics have qualifications. Just look at the row of framed certifications from classes they have taken,” says Luis Duran, brand director at safety systems manufacturer Triconex, part of Invensys Process Systems, in Lake Forest, Calif. “Generally speaking, everywhere we go in life, we expect people to be competent,” adds Chuck Miller, DeltaV Safety Instrumented Systems business development manager, at process controls vendor Emerson Process Management, in Austin, Texas. “We have drivers licenses, pilots have licenses and ratings, even food service workers are certified. But there are no real competency or certification requirements for manufacturing safety people. The only other profession I can think of without certification requirements is politicians.”

The topic of safety is covered by several governmental and standards organizations. Many times, they recognize the standards of each other. In the United States, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is charged with overseeing workplace safety. The European standards body, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) issues standards. Another standards body in the United States is the National Fire Protection Association, which promulgates NFPA 70, also known as the National Electrical Code. Still another standard is ANSI/ISA 84, developed by the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) and adopted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

According to Miller and others, both OSHA and IEC, through its standards 61508 and 61511, state that people involved with the safety lifecycle must be competent in the area in which they deal. This is not always the case, in practice, and it may be difficult to implement. “In my experience,” states Miller, “even people we consider to be safety experts may not be expert in all areas of the lifecycle. For example, a reliability engineer may know a lot about the equipment, but may not be able to competently go into the plant and effectively calibrate and maintain that equipment.”

There is another aspect to the problem of competency in safety areas in today’s workforce. Angela Summers, Ph.D., is president of SIS-Tech Solutions, a Houston-based process safety consultancy, and author of “Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems (IPS),” published by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). She sees knowledge walking out the door with every staff person who retires or leaves for another job. “Only a small amount of knowledge can save many hours of work or prevent mistakes leading to process hazards,” Summers says. “Process safety competence is sustained by a foundation of written process safety information, covering the process hazards, technology and equipment. Unfortunately, many users do not see the value of this documentation, having relied so long on the tribal knowledge of their organizations.

“Tribal knowledge” grows during hazard analyses conducted throughout the equipment life to identify and evaluate events caused by abnormal equipment operation, Summers says. “Each set of new eyes provides another opportunity to identify previously unseen risk in the process design basis,” she notes.

Knowledge also evolves over time, as lessons learned during research and development are supplemented by those learned during equipment operation, Summers continues. “Loss of containment events identify weaknesses in the risk reduction strategy, leading to a re-examination of design and management practices. Continuous analysis and improvement of design and management practices is the best means for counteracting loss of expertise through retirements and downsizing and equipment degradation through age and obsolescence,” concludes Summers.

No safety awareness

The problem of competency is not confined to the process industry. Discrete manufacturing, or machine control, has its own set of safety problems. J.B. Titus is manager of business development and safety standards at automation supplier Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., in Norcross, Ga., and a specialist in this side of manufacturing. “The two approaches have some overlap and some differences,” says Titus. “When machines really started to be driven by safety systems technology and standards around the 2002 or 2003 time frame, by and large, the market wasn’t even aware of safety systems. What we often found was that people were actually disabling safeties. In old systems, that was as simple as jumpering a relay,” Titus relates. “New systems, however, contained diagnostics so ...