Asset Integrity & Process Safety

Safety incidents around the world have raised public concern about asset integrity and process safety.

With good reason, regulators today are looking for companies to demonstrate that they have systems in place to provide effective control mechanisms.

Asset integrity implies the effective management of risks of any failure of structure, plant, equipment or systems that could either cause or contribute to a major accident. Process safety comprises a management system that provides effective control of process hazards that could lead to a major accident. Discovering weaknesses in control systems by experiencing a major incident is too late and too costly. Early warning of dangerous deterioration within critical systems provides an opportunity to avoid major incidents.

What is Wood Group doing to ensure asset integrity and process safety?

Given the broad spectrum of our business, Wood Group looks at specific risks for specific activities.

Within our Engineering & Production Facilities division, our focus is on assurance of safety in the design and engineering of facilities, the effectiveness of operating and maintenance strategies, awareness and control of processes that may have significant environmental impact, and the ability to assume overall control when taking on duty holder / operator responsibilities.

In our Gas Turbine Services business, we must demonstrate operating and maintenance strategies to assure plant uptime and minimum loss of production, avoidance of asset damage and effective use of resources.

And, our Well Support businesses employ effective procedures for the control of major process hazards like pressure, ionising radiation and explosives; we ensure the integrity of field service equipment and effectively control test facilities and approved premises.

Improving asset integrity and process safety remains an ongoing priority. A detailed self-assessment questionnaire distributed to companies across Wood Group has provided a quantitative assessment and gap analysis of where we are and where we need to be.

This exercise is the beginning of a long-term programme. It has stimulated many productive discussions and resulted in a better understanding of what asset integrity and process safety mean to our operations.

We are conducting in-depth analyses for each company to address identified issues and to actively promote more learning from businesses that exhibit best practices.