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Owner operators globally are facing increasingly stringent laws and regulations related to health and safety. To ensure compliance, regulatory authorities are imposing significant penalties for non-conformance.   

There is little surprise that surveys often show safety and compliance are the two factors that owners of industrial facilities are most concerned about.  

What is going on?
Situational awareness is a key element in operational risk management. It is impossible to manage and mitigate risks if you do not first understand what they are.  

Advanced risk management goes beyond site surveys and observations, using data from a range of sources to add detail and context. Taking the digital twin model created during the engineering phase as the starting point, you can augment understanding with geospatial data, time series information, real-time sensor metrics, planned and unplanned maintenance activities, data historian records and visualization and analytics insights. 

Adding this information to an operational twin provides situational awareness of the specific risks surrounding every asset in your production facility. You are then equipped to improve the operational phase of the facility lifecycle including SIMOPS, work planning, emergency planning and response,  shutdown/turnaround and outage planning and management. 

Managing change is crucial
Ensuring compliance requires a complete understanding of processes and elements. Operational excellence and management of change naturally result in better compliance outcomes. Maintaining the accuracy of essential plant engineering, maintenance and operations information is vital, providing the insights you need to deliver safe and efficient plant operations. 

It is impossible to understate the importance of managing plant change to improving safety. Failure to manage change properly has been identified on countless occasions as being a significant contributory factor to major health and safety incidents. Gaps in recordkeeping about asset configuration changes means that employees are exposed to unknown risks. 

Traceability of plant changes and auditability of the management of change process are essential to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. A digital twin plays an important role, recording all changes with full auditable traceability. A workflow engine then drives the review, approval and implementation cycle of changes to ensure consistent execution – helping to keep workers safe. 

What does this reduced risk look like? Hexagon’s j5 Operations Management Solutions provide all this functionality and more.  

From shift logs to strategic decision-making
Traditional shift logs exist as separate entities, often completed on a team-by-team basis. j5 Shift Operations Management collects and centralizes logs from across the enterprise, allowing control room personnel and operators to generate shift log entries. The j5 Operations Logbook also allows the shift supervisor to review daily operations activities. Procedural changes can be communicated to the shift crew in a digital format using j5 Standing Orders – sometimes known as a ‘bulletin board’.  

The bulletin board, control room and field operator logs sit at the heart of the shift handover report. But by including relevant data from other sources, such as the data historian, the report can be enhanced to increase situational awareness and to keep shift team members safer.  

The enhanced shift handover reports can be collated and summarized to create management reports for the corporate team, which helps to inform strategy and future spend. 

Digitizing plant operations
j5 Operations Management Solutions bring quick-time-to-value for users in both production and maintenance activities. The value goes beyond simply turning paper into digital records; mobility is seamless, increasing opportunities for remote working, reducing production floor interactions and associated risks.  

As well as simplifying data capture, j5 Operations Management Solutions also makes data more readily available to your digital twin. You can access, review, use and update information – and push it back to the other systems you rely on for operations. Digitizing plant operations will improve your ability to deliver on health and safety compliance requirements. 

Integrated output
One of the biggest barriers to data-driven health and safety improvements is the fact that business information is often held in application-specific silos. j5 Operations Management Solutions can help unite data from disparate sources, allowing you to create feature-rich, easy-to-understand reports. 

With improved access to data, it becomes easier to make decisions that result in genuine health and safety improvements. 

Control of work
Control of work is where risk management moves from theory to practice. Business tools like risk assessment, isolation management and conflict detection ensure that risks are managed effectively. 

j5 Control of Work can utilize data from other systems of record in day-to-day activities to ensure conflicts are resolved in advance of work beginning. You can also digitally require that risk assessments are completed and monitor the competency of work party members. j5 Control of Work helps ensure that your operations are fully in compliance with your industry standards and legal obligations. 

Conclusion
Delivering ongoing health and safety improvements is reliant on understanding the risks present in your operating environment and identifying opportunities for improvement. Simplifying the process of capturing and accessing data in context from your environment will be crucial to deliver continuous advances. 

j5 Operations Management Solutions allows you to improve overall knowledge of your operating environment and to share relevant information to shift teams. By keeping them informed about risks and remedies, you empower employees to better protect themselves and to avoid health and safety incidents. 

To learn more about j5 Operations Management Solutions and where it fits into your efforts to achieve digital transformation, please  watch the Hexagon and OSIsoft “Essential Elements of an Operations Digital Twin” webinar series.