Chapter 10 – Management of Risk and Reliability of Existing Plants and Operations

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses how the essential elements of process safety and reliability can be classified. It presents the way to structure the approach for managing the risks of operating a plant, the importance of both monitoring and auditing, and the difference between them and how to upgrade safety software. It also addresses the most important steps in the risk management, i.e., setting up quality operations, monitoring, and auditing. A simple written assessment of the level of process safety can be provided using some systematic structure, such as Hawksley's six principles. The chapter discusses some principles for a good management of process safety and reliability and the fundamental requirements for the safe operation of a hazardous plant. It explains some approaches to the assurance of effective process risk management and also discusses the importance of apt audit program to process safety and loss prevention. The routing of the permits to the file via the plant manager is a good way to enable a monitoring of the procedure. It is insufficient to base initiatives in a risk management program solely on identified hazards and hazardous scenarios.