TRUTH # 5
Your SIS should protect your plant for its lifecycle.

PRODUCTION ASSETS are built to last, and even when the investment is planned for a 20-year lifetime, additional investments frequently extend their life beyond the original design specification. Few Safety Instrumented Systems can extend their lifecycle and enhance their capabilities over the complete lifetime of the production asset.

A Safety Instrumented system should quietly provide year after year of safe and extremely reliable performance in mission critical applications. Its performance should be consistent and the user should not have to think about them very often.

Many years can pass between single component failures. However, as time passes, control technology advances, causing both vendors and customers to deal with component obsolescence.

Your SIS provider should continually invest in sustaining engineering to ensure continuity of the products you rely on. While you may not have experienced component failures in your system, you probably consider partnering with your vendor in battling obsolescence and advancing the technology of your safety or critical control system beyond its lifecycle and more in line of the lifecycle of the processes they protect.

Your SIS provider must understand the importance of planning the upgrade process to ensure maximum effectiveness at minimum cost while meeting best practices in safety and following the standard’s safety lifecycle, reducing downtime, avoiding complications, and disruption in the plant.

A well-planned upgrade can be performed in a few hours. can save up to 80% when compared to a full system replacement. Upgrades also drive support and training costs down by reducing re-training costs and spare inventory requirements for multiple system versions.

If you have existing SIS systems, it is far more cost effective to choose an upgrade path that utilizes most of your existing components. You should grade vendors higher who provide upgrade paths in which your existing chassis, power supplies, terminations, field wiring and cabinetry remain in place.