Improving integrity management of safety-critical systems on North Sea oil & gas installations

SCI has recently released a safety audit and monitoring software tool aimed at helping North Sea operators to manage more effectively the safety and integrity of their oil & gas installations, most of which are operating close to or beyond their original design life. Since the 1990s, the continuous demands to reduce costs has led to a reduction of the offshore workforce, which in turn has resulted in a reduction of the levels of maintenance impacting on the overall integrity of some installations. The need for enhanced integrity assurance has been recognised by the offshore industry and the recent final report on the HSE Asset Integrity Key Programme 3 (KP3) indicated that the physical state of installations was considered to be poor for more than 50 percent of the inspected installations.

Screen shot showing list of degraded components
Screen shot showing detailed report for a system

MATRICS has been developed in response to the key issues and recommendations identified in the HSE KP3 to provide operators with a simple and efficient means of managing the integrity of safety-critical elements throughout their operational lives. It is designed to complement maintenance management systems by providing an overall view of the integrity of installations and their systems via performance indicators and highly visual reports, which can be used by the senior management as an input for decision making. MATRICS, which stands for Management Audit Tool for Rapid Investigation of Critical Systems, is a very versatile software tool, which can be used for assessing and monitoring the condition of critical systems and components against their performance standards, for prioritising remedial actions, and for compliance demonstration. It facilitates the assessment of the technical risks arising from continued operation with degraded safety critical elements, which could potentially lead to critical situations.

The assessment method used within MATRICS is flexible and can be tailored to the specific needs of individual operators. It enables them to assign a Priority Level to each safety critical component based on a quick assessment of the consequences of failure and the actual condition of each component. The assessment of the integrity at the system level is facilitated by the reporting of the number of degraded components within each critical system via a traffic light alert system.

The software has been designed as a web-based and multi-user tool to enable companies to share information effectively and can be easily integrated within existing IT systems. Relevant existing data can also be transferred from existing system to MATRICS to ease the initial population of data.

For further information, please contact: Guillaume Vannier, Senior Engineer at SCI (01344 636 550; E-mail: g.vannier@steel-sci.com).