ABB digitalises process safety lifecycle management

ABB launches SafetyInsight helping customers operating high hazard processes to reduce production losses, lower maintenance costs, and optimise safety and compliance.   

ABB has launched ABB Ability SafetyInsight a suite of digital software applications that support companies across the energy and process sectors throughout the entire lifecycle of process safety management (PSM). 

Operating as a central source of information the software digitalises early Engineering Technology (ET) data to create a process safety digital twin, using this data to then give context to the vast amount of data generated through information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems. 

Karl Watson, global digital sales solution architect for process safety, ABB Energy Industries said: “Companies operating in high hazard industries invest significant time and effort developing the basis of safety during the engineering phase of a facility. This critical knowledge is then often left ‘on-the-shelf’, leaving operation and maintenance teams to ‘re-invent the wheel’ when it comes to understanding the hazards and risks associated with their processes.” 

Taking this unique approach of combing IT and OT data with ET data, SafetyInsight enables valuable engineering data (such as HAZOP and LOPA reports) to be digitalised, and readily accessible by operation and maintenance teams in simplified, intuitive, and easy to understand visual formats. 

Ongoing risk assessments can then be based on digitalised safety data. The addition of the IT/OT data provides near real time updates, enabling the accumulative impact of operation and maintenance activities to be visualised on a dynamic risk matrix, to further aid risk assessments and management of operational risk.

Watson continued: “Engineering Technology data, like any digital twin, must be validated. SafetyInsight facilitates this by capturing actual operation and maintenance data in context with the early design assumptions, enabling improvement to be identified and implemented, in other words, ‘closing the loop.’ In addition to increased safety, these improvements can help minimize production downtime and reduce maintenance costs.”  

The suite delivers process safety dashboards to provide the right information, to the right person, at the right time, to make the right, informed, decision. 

Watson concluded: “ABB SafetyInsight along with other ABB Information Management Systems (IMS) applications have a strong track record for helping large energy companies achieve higher uptime for their assets – with one company reaching over 99 per cent. The software suite also supported another global energy company in reducing the annual testing of safety system valves by as much as 30 per cent.”