SARACon offers an integrated suite of quantitative activities, which can be used to optimize plant economic performance and industrial safety. Many of the activities listed on the experience page exploit these analytical techniques to produce the results needed to answer specific client needs and objectives.

These techniques generally fall into two categories:

• Risks attributable to the unreliability of production process
• Risks attributable to accidents

The productivity and safety issues findings feed into the SARACon Integrated Economic decision-making process to produce the results needed to affect confident economic decision-making.

Typical examples of the broad approaches taken to build the baselines for economic decision making are as provided below.

• Process Reliability and Availability Assessment - Realistic and Optimized Goal setting, Predicting through-put, identifying process pinch points, ranking components in order of importance to production, and the use of this information to prepare a reliability focused maintenance program.
• System Reliability Assessment - Predicting the reliability of safety systems, identifying critical components, and providing a sound technical basis for graded surveillance, test, and preventative maintenance programs.

Both of the above are important to RAMI, since on many occasions, the potential costs of an accident may have a dominant impact on the costs of production. Loss of production due to an unplanned release of hazardous materials may be critical to the economic viability of a plant which produces or uses toxic or hazardous materials within the process, particularly if it is sufficiently serious as to involve regulatory agencies.

• Economic Risk Assessment and Decision Making - Using real-time decision making tools developed from the results of availability and reliability assessments to make investment decisions:
  • When to replace equipment in kind or when to tolerate increased levels of planned and unplanned maintenance
  • When to procure insurance or when to accept economic risk
  • Budget management and planning and decision making processes which result in the allocation of available resources to options which produce a maximum Return on Investment (ROI)

As always, SARACon tailors the applications of these techniques to ensure that they are commensurate with the needs of the task!

• Risk Assessment - A fully quantitative process, which when married with qualitative hazard identification processes can quickly become a real time risk manger for use during design and operations. This provides a focus for each important safety systems, so that:
  • Individual components have appropriate levels of quality during their procurement, i.e. standards and requirements are reduced wherever they can be technically justified
  • Administrative controls and procedural guidance for operations and maintenance have adequate detail and scope
  • Scope and periodicity of lifetime surveillance, testing and scheduled / planned maintenance activities are commensurate with the reliability needed to meet facility economic goals.

• Development of training scenarios - The results from the risk assessment can be effective in defining:
  • realistic and important scenarios for the emergency response program
  • an initial focus and scope for a facility-wide vulnerability assessment.