Project Profile
Utilities Risk Assessment for Global Chemical Manufacturing Site
Read how our Safety, Risk and Compliance team helped a global chemical company facilitate a plant-wide risk assessment to evaluate future reliability of an integrated power distribution system with the goal of avoiding shutdown/downtime.
Project Objectives
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Phase 1: Identify potential initiating events (failure modes), predict effects, build event trees for calculating risk value
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Phase 2:
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Phase 3: Rerun the event trees to determine the annual risk reduction savings
Project Overview
A global chemical company operating more than 50 manufacturing sites worldwide experienced an equipment failure in one of its power distribution systems at its largest plant, which resulted in total plant shutdown. Prior to this incident, the company's manufacturing site had operated for 16 years without shutting down. The company performed a root cause analysis (RCA) to find causes and help staff make changes to further minimize the risk of recurrence. During this review, management asked the RCA team whether they could assure that this would not happen again since it would negatively impact business continuity. While the RCA team was confident they had identified both immediate and latent causes, they acknowledged that there could be many other ways a complex, integrated utility system could fail and lead to plant shutdowns.
To understand the potential failure modes and related risk, the company hired ABSG Consulting Inc. (ABS Consulting), an ABS Group company, to facilitate a plant-wide utilities risk assessment using failure modes and effects and event tree analysis. Our Safety, Risk and Compliance team customized a fit-for-purpose assessment to help the client identify and prioritize utilities system improvements and mitigate risk to avoid downtime incidents.
Client Needs
- Minimize the risk of shutdown recurrences due to equipment failures
- Understand causes and effects leading to plant shutdown as well as potential failure modes and subsequent risk
- Develop strategy for corrective actions based on prioritized risk reduction measures
- Calculate risk value and annual risk reduction savings