Training & Competency Building

Why Build Competency and IEC 61511 requirements?

We would like to highlight the need for competent personnel to handle functional safety lifecycle with an example: In one of the SIS Design and engineering projects, a +13 years experienced and certified FS professional from the EPC contractor’s company asked us to lower the cost of our proposal citing the following reason: I have already asked the instrument manufacturers to supply only “SIL certified devices” and hence the target SIL of any SIF in this project will easily be met. So your work is reduced.

HAZOP.EU expert made just one statement to close the deal at our pricing: There is nothing called as a “SIL certified device” and to meet the target SIL, we need to design every loop for PFDavg, Architectural Constraints and Systematic Capability (IEC 61511 requirements).

In the old (2003) edition of the IEC standard, competency was specified but in latest 2016 edition, additional requirements exclusively related to competency (shall) is specified. In a nutshell, here is what the standards say.

(The Redline version of the IEC standard is used below to show how the latest edition has strongly emphasised the need for competency)

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Competency for entire FS Lifecycle?

A personnel may or may not be competent in all the phases of the lifecycle and that’s perfectly fine. But he/she must be competent in the phases of the lifecycle for which he/she is assigned “responsibility and accountability”.

Training is one way to gain awareness and knowledge about functional safety and demonstrate competence.

In our experience, we have seen that incompetent personnel handling FS tasks have generated volumes of documentation but seldom does these documents help.  We have observed that Operations and Maintenance personnel are not aware of the terms like demand rate on a SIF, Proof Testing Interval and Coverage, SIF degradation mechanisms, etc…

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How can we Support?

Our way of conducting training to build competency is different. We don’t use the lazy technique of changing slides. All our training are focussed on engaging people by creative ways of learning (like: using games, practical case studies, discussion models, etc…) so that participants can meaningfully and effectively learn and become technically competent to apply the concepts learnt in real scenarios.

HAZOP.EU trainers are experienced professionals (certified and competent) having a wealth of industry knowledge and experience not only in process/functional safety lifecycle implementation but in connecting domains like: project management, engineering design, control system integration, EPC, PMC, Site activities, etc…

 Having delivered multiple FS training over these years, we have created a variety of options to choose from.