Why is it important?
Safeguards are intended to reduce the likelihood of unwanted events (fires, explosions, loss of containment). The ability to view all safeguards together and filter by type makes auditing and maintaining safeguards highly efficient. This module will help to improve maintenance/audit efficiency and risk reduction in a facility.
How does it work?
Safeguard Criticality is determined by looking at several characteristics of safeguards and using them in an algorithm to establish a criticality “score”. These characteristics include how many times a safeguard is used, the types of risk on which they reduce the likelihood, the number of credits of likelihood reduction and others.
Overview
Safeguard Criticality lists all safeguards or IPLs contained within a PHA and orders them from most to least critical. Each safeguard can be selected to view number of occurrences in the PHA and number of credits for each.
New Live PHA Analytics (Beta) Safeguard Ranking will automatically update as data is updated in LivePHA.
Each Safeguard Ranking module can be run on a single PHA or on multiple PHAs (e.g. an entire plant).
Best Practices for Criticality Output
To achieve the highest value and quality of the Criticality results of a PHA, the PHA should have no Validation Errors and all the Validation Warnings should be reviewed and corrected when required.
Validation Errors and Warnings flag PHA documentation that could result in misinterpreting the original intent of the PHA. For example, on the below scenario, the change in likelihood from Inherent to Residual Risk Ranking is more than the number of credits identified in the scenario. In this case, either the likelihood change or credit is documented incorrectly as per the intent of the session. If the credit is documented incorrectly, this could lead to a misrepresentation of the criticality of the safeguard.
Best Practices for Criticality Comparisons across PHAs
As criticality factors used to represent Severity and Likelihood codes may be adjusted to properly represent each specific Risk Matrix version, comparing criticality results across multiple PHAs are the most valuable when the PHAs compared utilized the same Risk Matrix. Comparison of Criticality from PHAs that used different Risk Matrices can result in an "apples to oranges" comparison, as the risk measurement from different Risk Matrices can be fundamentally different.
What's Next?
Learn how to use Safeguard Ranking with this HOW TO article.
Learn how to use Live PHA Analytics Safguard Ranking with this HOW TO artcile.
Read about Safeguard Categories used in Risk Alive.