Asset Integrity Management (AIM) is a system in which complex reliability, maintenance, safety, regulatory and environmental issues are addressed while meeting the business goals of the company.
The optimisation of operational expenditure requires the management of the operational risk of a company, a plant or a unit. Operational risk is managed through the assessment of how facility risks, production risks and people risks interact with each other, directly or indirectly. The most effective way to reduce risk is by identifying specific areas that need improvement based on their contributions to the overall risk.
Risk-based approaches for planning and development of asset management strategies have, during the past decade, emerged as effective means to optimise spending on asset integrity whilst managing safety and business risk.
Risk-based methods such as Risk Based Inspection, Reliability Centred Maintenance and Reliability, Availability and Maintainability can be used to rank system and equipment criticality and to develop strategies for maintenance and inspection for managing the risks. These more advanced quantitative methods allow projection of the effect of changes in conditions to the equipment on the plant risk profile. Therefore, they are able to provide assistance in development of optimised maintenance strategies and programs.
Introducing DNV’s Risk Based Maintenance (RBM)
By assessing past performance, identifying the risk among individual equipment/systems and identifying opportunity areas for improvement, plants are moving towards a risk-based management philosophy incorporating the latest approaches in:
- Risk Based Inspection (RBI)
- Safety Integrity Level (SIL) Analysis
- Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) and Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA)
- Task bundling and resource load levelling
- Work Order Automation
Adopting these approaches to risk management allows plants to grow sustainably by utilising past service experience, specialist knowledge and expertise, and where appropriate, creating value-chain relationships with proven vendors and contractors who provide the necessary resources and technology for the plants to achieve their goals.
As the leader of risk management in the process industry, DNV has conducted more than 300 studies around the world demonstrating great benefits of using Risk Based Inspection and Reliability Centred Maintenance methodologies to develop and optimise inspection and maintenance strategies.
Our experience and software developed with Risk Based Maintenance has increasingly shown that the benefits of the integrated process exceed those achieved for the individual initiatives. Synergies are gained from viewing job packing from a risk management perspective, managing massive volumes of data and streamlining workflow for best engineering practices.
How to make all applications work together and optimise the effect?
The question is: how do we integrate these individual methods, software tools and the results from studies that apply to different groups of plant equipment? How do we make a sustainable system of best practices for asset management, in terms of inspection, function testing and maintenance optimisation that is embedded into the day-to-day work execution?
As the leader of risk management for process industry, DNV introduces Risk Based Maintenance that integrates Risk Based Inspection for pressure containing equipment, Management of Safety Critical Equipment by Safety Integrity Level Assessment for Electrical/ Electronic/ Programmable Electronic Systems, and a streamlined approach to Reliability Centred Maintenance planning for rotating,
electrical and control systems.
What can we achieve through the integrity approach?
By combining in-depth DNV engineering knowledge and state-of-the-art software technology, DNV Software is able to offer the most flexible system for asset integrity solutions. DNV has a wide range of solutions for the entire asset plant life cycle; these risk analysis tools help customers adopt risk-based techniques to optimise their inspection and maintenance plans, and to minimise operation costs while maintaining safety and business performance.
However, it is critical to consider all aspects related to technical data when refining information into enterprise knowledge. One of the key requisites to succeed in implementing the RBM strategies is to ensure all data from various disciplines and engineering tools are integrated, consistent and distributive.
DNV Software provides asset integrity management systems; this allows various professional software tools to work together, each with their own specialist diverse applications – but merged into one single data depository and one work process template, without the need for costly and comprehensive projects.
Integrated with DNV’s risk-based software, DNV’s asset integrity systems provide a continuous updating of risk assessment and a communication bridge to the plant systems applied for the day-to-day plant operation.