Hazard Review Services

Need help with hazard reviews, HAZOPs, process hazard analyses (PHAs)? We can help. PII staff have led more than 250 major PHAs/HAZOPs and revalidations and we co-authored the definitive textbook on these analyses and published many papers on the topic as well.

While you need trained PHA leaders within your company to execute hazard reviews of changes (MOCs) that come up daily, the time required to properly facilitate and lead a PHA (revalidations for unit-wide PHAs and/or for PHAs for large projects) is extensive and includes preparation time, meeting time, and completing the proper documentation of the findings and resolutions.
PII Conducts Meetings with Speed & Efficiency. Because of our vast experience spanning 25+ years of optimizing PHA procedures, and with our hands-on expertise in the best software, we can lead meetings faster than anyone else, while maintaining quality/thoroughness. This saves cost for you and your projects.
Our leadership includes:
- Delivering superior quality reports with fully understandable and stand-alone recommendations (avoids having to view the worksheets at the same time)
- In-depth knowledge of process safety engineering and management, which provides us with a clear understanding of the links and therefore the deliverables needed from a PHA to other PSM elements. It is easy for us to provide information that feeds forward into reliability and PSM such as:
  - We can produce a comprehensive list of critical equipment and critical procedures that help a company avoid duplication of effort in generating such lists.
  - We can easily expand to consider quality and reliability issues, allowing a comprehensive coverage of business risk. This greatly enhances your return on investment in the PHA.
  - Consideration of equipment maintenance during PHAs; we always consider how the equipment will be maintained long-term in our PHAs.
  - As a side project, we can help develop trouble-shooting guides for operations from the PHA tables.
  - Because we helped write the book on layer of protection analysis (LOPA), we can easily integrate selection and specification of SIL for safety instrumented systems into our deliverables. This saves time and considerable expense if a second company is hired to only perform the SIL analysis.
- Performing hazard reviews of critical procedures (Start-up, Shutdown, Emergency Shutdown)
- Expertise in all PHA techniques (HAZOP, What-If, FMEA, LOPA, SIL, etc.) and capable of easily choosing the right techniques based on the complexity of the process and the type of unit operations
- Broad industry-specific knowledge from a PHA perspective
- Our 3rd Party objectivity helps reduce internal politics between people, companies, and internal departments

Here’s One Typical Project Scope:

PII leaders and scribes work with your staff to initiate the PHA preparation; this typically involves:

A conference call with necessary staff or if needed a ½-day site visit to become familiar with the process by reviewing process safety information (P&IDs and other documents) and to review the PHA process and become familiar with the company’s process safety standards, specifically the standard for conducting PHAs.
Preparation work includes reviewing P&IDs and procedures in order to divide the process and procedures into nodes or sections for review during the hazard review.

PII leader (and scribe, if requested) will lead the PHA/HAZOP meeting using the most effective rules in the industry.

Typically, our PHA meetings are 2 to 3 times faster than other those led and scribed by others, and we find more scenairos than other teams because is kept "fresh and lively" by minimizing wasted time. This is because of the method refinements we have learned in leading and supervising more than 2000 PHAs/HAZOPs in the past 25+ years.
Our facilitation rules include using "linking of consequences to causes" to reduce redundancy of discussions. And we help the team quickly decide when a scenario discussion can be concluded (including proper qualitative judgment of risk) so the team can move on to the next discussion. There are 20+ other meeting facilitation rules we use to keep the discussions moving briskly.

Documentation efforts by PII include:

Issuing the recommendations
Cleaning up the PHA tables
Updating the tables and documenting the resolutions during all project phases (if requested)
Writing the final PHA report

Why Choose PII?

PII has significant experience in leading large project PHAs, unit-wide PHAs, and process specific PHAs and revalidations; PII staff have led more than 250 major PHAs and revalidations
Thousands have used our training services to become proficient in Process Hazard Analysis leadership, implementing process safety management, leading investigations and root cause analysis, and writing effective procedures
Extensive industry PSM experience and knowledge; PII staff were co-authors of the AIChE/CCPS-sponsored textbooks on PHA methods (Guidelines for Hazard Evaluation Procedures; 2nd Edition, 1992 and 3rd Edition, 2008)
Extensive knowledge in failure rates and human error probability that helps us to diplomatically break deadlocks on teams. PII staff were primary authors of the AIChE/CCPS-sponsored textbook on the best semi-quantitative risk assessment method (Layer of Protection Analysis [LOPA], 2001 and Independent Protection Layers and Initiating Events, 2009)
Strong facilitation skills with experience in leading multi-functional teams as part of PHAs and other improvement projects
Experience in incident investigation, root cause analysis, and human factors to help the PHA team identify potential causes and effects of incidents. PII staff were primary authors of the AIChE/CCPS-sponsored textbook on Investigation methods (Guidelines for Investigating Chemical Process Incidents; 2nd Edition, 2003)
Significant experience in revalidating PHAs. PII staff have written about 20 papers/articles on process safety management, including many papers on how to effectively perform PHAs/HAZOPs
Recognized experts in the field of process safety and process hazard analyses. In fact, the founder of PII led the first PHA that was submitted to US OSHA for compliance assessment (in 1990; as part of a settlement agreement between the client and OSHA)
Inherent capability for training and mentoring of your internal PHA leaders and scribes
In 2006 through 2008 alone we performed 65 complete unit-wide PHAs for 15 companies in 5 countries. This included work at petrochemical plants, gas separation units, steel production, ammonia/urea, industrial chemical, and specialty polymers