Schneider Electric’s Safety Advisor Designed to Address Real-Time Hazardous Events

Schneider Electric has announced EcoStruxure Process Safety Advisor, an IIoT-based digital process safety platform and service that enables customers to visualize and analyze real-time hazardous events and risks to their enterprise-wide assets, operations and business performance.

Safety Advisor is built on Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure SIF Manager application for tracking and validating safety instrumented function (SIF) performance over the life of a plant.  It provides a single view into the health and status of the user’s safety instrumented functions, which helps to identify potential risks and their impact on operations performance.

Platform- and vendor-agnostic, Safety Advisor uniquely extends the functionality of SIF Manager.  Using a secure, cloud-based infrastructure, Safety Advisor aggregates real-time data, analytics and insights from multiple sites and geographies into a single user interface, so customers can create an accurate, enterprise-wide risk profile in real time.  It also identifies the need to take corrective action via easy-to-understand performance dashboards and leading indicators for safety health and then documents the entire process using an embedded SIF audit trail that supports safety compliance.

Safety Advisor is a solution that reportedly consolidates and contextualizes past, present and future operating risks and performance data for the entire enterprise across multiple sites and geographies.  The visual clues, statistics and analysis of past and present performance improve decision making and help owners, managers and operators mitigate risks before they become a serious safety incident.

First, it collects, digitizes and analyzes local data from existing safety systems, process control systems and other layers of protection and accurately monitors gaps between their design and actual performance.  It then provides contextual insight into past, present and future operating risks on real-time operating conditions.

From there, Safety Advisor aggregates data from every site into a secure cloud platform, with a single searchable interface that provides a dynamic view into enterprise-wide operating risks.  Users can then drill down to visualize risks related to individual sites, process units, hazards, protection layers and safety device integrity.

Mark Sen Gupta, ARC Advisory Group, commented, “ARC research shows that operating profitably and safely requires personnel to understand their past, present and future risks.  Having an automated system that provides that critical insight ensures every member of the organization—from corporate and business managers all the way down to a site maintenance technician—can make fully informed decisions about how to best operate their assets safely.  Having immediate access to this information, in near real time and via a single cloud-based user interface, provides a necessary single source of truth.  ARC believes solutions like Safety Advisor will drive more effective collaboration, faster resolution of past and current issues and faster detection of potential issues before they become problems.”