Articles - Visions Enterprise

For the U.S. biofuels industry, regulatory compliance is critical but complex, involving various federal and state regulations. Ensuring compliance with these regulations is not only challenging but essential to avoid costly fines and operational disruptions. The key is leveraging the right asset integrity management (AIM) software system to streamline the process and ensure readiness for any audit.

The Petrochemical industry has a deep understanding of the intricate challenges of asset integrity management. Owner operators within this sector typically oversee a diverse range of equipment types, materials, and processes, often more varied than those in the Oil & Gas sector. Additionally, Petrochemical companies operate within a heightened risk landscape, encompassing safety and environmental mishaps such as loss of containment, resulting in toxic and flammable chemical releases, all stemming from the inherent properties of the materials involved.

The immediate cost saving advantages of adopting an RBI approach to asset integrity management are gaining momentum. Corporations are increasingly realizing that RBI, with its ability to intelligently analyze equipment’s probability of failure (POF) vs consequence of failure (COF), is the prudent approach to managing critical assets. Embracing RBI assures that a structured, systematic, and technically defensible approach is used to make decisions. RBI significantly reduces instances of equipment failure and minimizes unplanned shutdowns.

In the realm of asset integrity management, where every moment counts in financial terms, organizations must prioritize strategies that are not only cost-effective but also prioritize safety, regulatory compliance, asset integrity, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision-making. This is particularly crucial for owner operators who are burdened by unnecessary expenses resulting from over inspection, under inspection and outdated inspection methods. Notably, equipment failures annually cost the US refining industry billions, with a significant portion attributed to static equipment loss of containment.

In asset integrity, effective data management is crucial to enable data correlation, the application of risk models and risk-based inspection scheduling. The Oil & Gas, Chemical, Pipeline and other industry sectors with asset numbers in the thousands struggle with handling vast amount of unrelatable (siloed) data.

When it comes to the asset integrity management (AIM) of plants and facilities, it seems that everyone has a different definition of what regulatory compliance entails. With so many differing regulatory bodies across the globe (each with different requirements) it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what steps a company needs to take to ensure that compliance will be met. Thus, it’s a challenging tenant of AIM to get right – and yet, with the risk of hefty fines in case of an audit failure, it’s also an expensive one to get wrong.

One area of increasing interest in the world of asset integrity management (AIM) for plants and facilities is that of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Leveraged properly, KPIs can be the catalyst for future advanced analytics of your equipment data. They provide a rare window of insight into the efficacy of various elements of your inspection data management (IDMS), equipping you with the tools you need to hone and target your strategies for better asset performance, reduced inspection costs, and superior mechanical integrity.

By now, the benefits of cloud computing for asset integrity management (AIM) are well known. The ability to store all asset data securely in the cloud – thereby outsourcing the complex and expensive IT support and maintenance involved in hosting it in-house – can be leveraged for tangible and immediate cost savings. However, when it comes to selecting the right software for cloud-based inspection data management, things are not quite as cut and dry.

The immediate cost saving advantages of adopting a Risk Based Inspection (RBI) approach to asset integrity management are gaining momentum. More and more corporations are realizing that RBI, with its ability to intelligently analyze equipment’s probability of failure (POF) vs consequence of failure (COF), is the more prudent approach to managing their critical assets. It assures that a structured, systematic, and technically defensible approach is used to make decisions. After all, it drastically reduces instances of equipment failure and more than halves the likelihood of unplanned shutdowns.