Asset Integrity and Reliability with Ageing Infrastructure - Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later!

Most manufacturing companies globally are currently faced with rapidly ageing process infrastructure. This infrastructure is often critical to business continuity and in many cases to process safety performance. Because of the current age and condition of these critical process components, the likelihood of significant failures and subsequent process disruptions and potential process safety incidents and/or accidental releases has become prevalent. Executives are faced with difficult decisions about where, when, and how much to invest towards infrastructure upgrades, while constantly weighing the potential health and safety and business implications associated with potential infrastructure failures and balancing the capital expenditure implications of such decisions.

This paper will examine, based on industry research and benchmarking, how ageing infrastructure currently affects operational efficiency in process manufacturing operations, the challenges faced by executives in the process manufacturing sector with managing infrastructure upgrades and investments, and tools and strategies that can be utilized to evaluate and assess infrastructure integrity and reliability; subsequently mitigating process safety risks. Both short-term and long-term asset integrity and reliability strategies will be presented. The paper will detail risk based management systems and infrastructure risk assessment techniques that can be utilized to assist companies in making complex decisions associated with categorizing infrastructure upgrades and mitigating the process safety risks associated with ageing processes and equipment.