The international functional safety standard IEC 61511 provides the safety lifecycle as a steadfast guideline to assess and mitigate risk for manufacturing processes including refineries, chemical, petrochemical, pulp and paper, and power plants. To achieve a functionally safe system, it is essential to follow each requirement in the standard. However, consistent execution is difficult to achieve and often depends on the tools used to perform analysis and specification of the safety instrumented system. For the functional safety consultants at exida, the need for a consistent work process was fulfilled with the creation of the exSILentia software suite. exSILentia includes a module for each stage of the safety lifecycle. Use of the tool ensures quality assessment and execution of a safety instrumented system, as well as compliance to the safety standard. exSILentia also streamlines these tasks, easily transferring data from one module to another to save the user time and money.
In this paper, the benefit of using exSILentia versus use of excel spreadsheets or other in-house tools is quantified. The intent is to show how users of the software reduce the number of engineering hours, and therefore dollars spent, for each safety lifecycle task. It is assumed that all required information is available when needed. Through conservative estimates, this paper proves that it pays to use exSILentia to support your safety lifecycle tasks and to make safety a priority.