As the chemical industry copes with the seismic shifts of the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing is clear: this proved to be an accelerant for first movers to stop thinking about change and make it happen. Many companies have seized upon the atmosphere of change to address key cybersecurity, operations and safety management issues in the chemical industry. The operations and maintenance teams are the people we rely on to operate and maintain assets and infrastructure that keep chemical plants and facilities running smoothly. Often these critical employees are forced to use inefficient paper based reports and spreadsheets and to manage key industrial processes such as control of work, inspections, maintenance, management of change, operator rounds, shift handover, troubleshooting and to capture operator shift logs. while also juggling large amounts of unstructured data such as engineering documents and schematics that are critical to ensuring safe operations at facilities. And, giving the move to remote work and the inherent difficulties updating and revising paper based assets, this information may also be outdated, inaccurate or inaccessible – it’s not as easy to head into the office or physically access remote locations to look for scattered paper copies.
These information and process management problems can and often do create safety risks. Hexagon studied 101 industrial accidents that occurred between 1983 and 2018 and found poor human procedures were a contributory factor. These industrial accidents killed 405 people and injured 2,163 others — a reminder on the importance of human factors and process safety. Inadequate information management processes increase operational risk, as personnel often don’t have quick access to all the information they need when safety-critical events occur.