Keeping Safety Systems Up to Date with Safety Services from HIMA

When organizations plan a turnaround for the maintenance of their plant, safety engineers also have to get involved with the work. They ensure that safety systems reliably provide functional safety after the turnaround is completed.

With any project as extensive as a plant turnaround, safety experts start preparing months in advance. This was also the case for OMV in Schwechat, Austria. By law, the oil and gas corporation is required to disassemble and inspect its petrochemical refinery every six years. In 2017, a total of 3,500 technicians from more than 50 partner organizations were on site to carry out the tasks involved in the turnaround. 19 safety experts from HIMA played an active role in the project.

Checking and Modernizing Safety Controllers
Those involved with the turnaround in Schwechat faced the enormous task of shutting down the entire plant to perform checks and then restarting it – all within just seven weeks. The biggest challenge in such a large-scale project is ensuring that each task is clearly coordinated and performed in a timely manner. The safety engineers from HIMA have to bring their expert knowledge for a wide range of safety systems on site, including older ones.

Utilizing Downtime to Make Safety Technology Fit for the Future
The focus of large projects like the OMV turnaround is to complete as much work as possible in the shortest possible time frame. “The refinery is very demanding in terms of technology. As an external partner, we had to completely immerse ourselves in this world. Our decades of experience made a huge contribution to the success of the project,” says Fabio Lodigiani, group vice president for safety services at HIMA. Over the course of seven weeks, 61 HIMA safety systems underwent a general inspection. Thanks to excellent project preparation and the large-scale deployment of HIMA engineers on site, the required work was completed even earlier than initially planned.

Why Should You Opt for Safety Services from HIMA?
Plant operators rely on safety services from HIMA to give them access to safety experts across the globe. Additionally, the necessary expertise for maintenance and service tasks for older safety solutions is available for the long term.