HIMA: Safety through Digitalization

On 23rd June, HIMA held a User Conference to commemorate the first-year anniversary of the Customer Solution Center in Singapore. The new facility located at the Alexandra Technopark brings HIMA experts closer to the region to facilitate collaboration with the customers, attending to customer needs and to co-create safety solutions. Friedhelm Best, Vice President Region Asia Pacific, gave the opening address and shared how HIMA’s independent and open Safety Platform can address various users’ requirements on functional safety.

The theme of the User Conference is “Safety going Digital”. Vice President Strategic Marketing (Germany), Peter Sieber, shared with the audience on why digitizing the functional safety lifecycle is key to bring operator requirements and supplier view on functional safety together, and how value is delivered with HIMA solutions to digitalization of functional safety in 4 areas: Security and Safety, Enduring Compliance, Streamline Engineering and Effective Management of Change.

The following equation shared by Mr Sieber was most memorable for me as I think that summarizes well why and how digitalization value-add functional safety:

According to the equation, safety is a function of “Competency” and “Complexity”. Safety has a direct relationship with “Competency” and an inversed relationship with “Complexity”. What this means to me is that that while having a high level of “Competency” in the safety aspects is important, it alone can achieve up to a certain level of functional safety. But if the “Complexity” of various aspects of the functional safety lifecycle can be reduced as well, the level of functional safety can go even higher. And quite obviously, digitalization is the way forward to achieving this objective.

For example, HIMA’s Safety Lifecycle Manager (SLM), is one of the many digital solutions created to address these aspects. The SLM is designed to gather safety related information generated by various stages of the functional safety lifecycle by different systems in one single platform. This solution eliminates the silo culture and provides a more holistic safety information management system. When it comes to safety auditing, having such solutions can really make the process more efficient, faster, cost effective and simpler, as compared to more manual and working with information from several systems.

Cybersecurity is, of course, another key important aspect for functional safety, for without it, there can be no safety. In addition to HIMA’s solution compliant to industrial standards (IEC 62443, IEC 61508, IEC 61511), additional strategies, such as the segregation of safety and security measures, create a secure environment to maintain safety and security throughout the entire functional safety lifecycle. HIMA has also collaborated with IT security specialist Genua to strengthen HIMA’s cybersecurity capabilities. At the event, HIMA showcased how the Genubox solution can address cyber vulnerabilities during the remote maintenance of plants and machines, using the encrypted connection for data transmission and the firewall functionality to enable highly secure remote maintenance access.