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When executing major capital projects, chemical and refining facilities often struggle with knowing exactly when to trigger formal change control procedures. Read this newsletter to learn how facilities can seamlessly align their Management of Change (MOC) workflow with project Process Hazard Analyses (PHAs) from early design stages through final Pre-Start-Up Safety Reviews (PSSRs).

A site PSM coordinator conducted a process safety audit at their chemical facility to identify gaps and major needs for improvements. The facility had, over the years, migrated away from some of its original baseline expectations and had not kept current with the performance expectations of others in the industry relative to managing their Process Safety Management (PSM) systems. Systems such as PSSRs, MOC, Employee Participation, Incident Investigations, and others were at different nodes of maturity. The facility decided they were overdue for an upgrade.

Following initial analysis of the PSM system by ioMosaic, the decision was made to begin the upgrade with the MOC system as a starting point. Most organizations struggle with change. By starting with the MOC workflow system, a new system could be implemented while at the same time minimizing changes in functionality for the end users. This would ensure the process engineers and others would be on board with the upgrade as soon as possible.

During that analysis, ioMosaic discovered that changes being initiated from major capital projects had not been included in the change control system; therefore, major steps such as PHAs in capital projects were not being scheduled to enable the designers to implement changes in the final process design.

Bonus!
This newsletter includes access to the BARPI incident report on the 2013 release of methyl mercaptan, a strong-smelling gas, which occurred at a chemical plant in Rouen, France, affecting tens of thousands of people. This incident exposed several deep-rooted organizational failures, including insufficient process risk analysis and a poor Management of Change (MOC) system.

Have a great and safe day.

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