Equipment management of chemical enterprises

Equipment management is an important part of the operation and management of chemical enterprises. Equipment management can be summarized as: based on the production and operation objectives of enterprises, through specific programs and measures, the whole life cycle of equipment (from planning, design, manufacturing, selection, purchase, installation, to use, maintenance, repair, transformation, scrap, update) scientific management of the activity process.

The main task of chemical equipment management is to carry out comprehensive management of equipment, keep equipment intact, continuously improve and improve the quality of enterprise equipment, give full play to equipment efficiency, and achieve good investment benefits.

Equipment failure will directly threaten the stable operation of production equipment, and even lead to production safety accidents. The importance of equipment management is self-evident, but the current equipment management status of many chemical companies is worrying, and the management level needs to be improved. To this end, this article briefly describes how to improve the equipment management level of chemical enterprises with the help of equipment event management. Accident and incident management is one of the elements of chemical process safety management. The Guiding Opinions of the State Administration of State Safety on Strengthening the Safety Management of Chemical Processes (Safety Supervision General Manager No. 3 [2013] No. 88) clearly states that enterprises should formulate a safety incident management system and strengthen the management of safety incidents such as attempted accidents (including signs of production accidents, unplanned parking, abnormal working conditions, leakage, minor injuries, etc.). It is necessary to establish an incentive mechanism for reporting attempted accidents and incidents. It is necessary to thoroughly investigate and analyze security incidents, find out the root causes of incidents, and promptly eliminate unsafe behavior of people and unsafe things. It is required to learn the lessons of accidents (incidents). After the enterprise completes the investigation of the accident (incident), it should implement preventive measures in a timely manner, organize internal analysis and exchanges, and learn the lessons of the accident (incident). It is necessary to attach importance to the collection of external accident information, conscientiously absorb the accident lessons of similar enterprises and devices, and improve safety awareness and accident prevention capabilities.

Equipment safety incidents account for a certain proportion of enterprise safety incidents, including production accident signs due to equipment and facility problems, unplanned parking, abnormal working conditions, leakage, minor injuries, etc. To improve the level of enterprise equipment management, we must first find out the gaps in management, and the equipment incidents have exposed the problems in enterprise equipment management. To this end, the author suggests paying attention to the following aspects.

First of all, the enterprise leaders should fully understand the significance of equipment event management to improve the level of enterprise equipment management, take the initiative to grasp equipment event management, including equipment safety incidents and abnormal equipment failures, and take the initiative to implement accident event management procedures. Even if the direct cause of these equipment events is process operation problems, they cannot be let go, because process operation problems leading to equipment failure is a link in the whole life cycle of equipment management and ensuring the integrity of equipment. It should be noted here that the main leaders and superiors of the enterprise should not focus too much on the number of events that occur in the enterprise, which is also a prominent problem that is difficult for enterprises to promote event management.

Second, advocate, encourage, and organize enterprise employees to actively report all equipment incidents (including abnormal equipment failures). In particular, for these incidents, the focus is not on accountability, but on the analysis of the causes. Incident analysis reports are shared within the company.

Pay attention to the analysis of events, find the root cause, to prevent the recurrence of similar accidents, the method of cause analysis generally uses the "accident tree analysis method". Accident tree analysis method is a commonly used analysis method in safety system engineering, it is a deductive reasoning method, this method of the system may occur in a certain accident and the various causes of the accident between the logical relationship with a tree diagram called the accident tree, through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the accident tree, to find out the main cause of the accident, to determine the safety countermeasures to provide a reliable basis, in order to achieve the purpose of predicting and preventing accidents.

The cause of the equipment event can first be found from the following aspects: (1) unreasonable design; (2) defective installation and commissioning; (3) poor manufacturing quality; (4) illegal command, illegal operation; (5) poor maintenance; (6) maintenance failure; (7) barbaric maintenance operation; (8) poor maintenance quality (including unreasonable materials) ;(9) overdue maintenance, (10) safety accessories, instrumentation failure, (11) improper use; (12) other.

On the basis of the above cause analysis, and then analyze and find the "root cause" from the management aspect, such as for the leakage of a machine seal, the analysis is because of the poor quality of maintenance, then why it will lead to poor maintenance quality, in-depth analysis found that the ability of maintenance workers is insufficient, then when formulating rectification measures, it is necessary to focus on the skills training of maintenance workers.

Based on the analysis of the root causes of the incident, formulate corrective measures (programs), including corrective measures and preventive measures, and learn from each other. Continuing the analysis of the above incidents, where is the root cause of the problem of "insufficient capacity of maintenance workers" and lack of "skills training of maintenance workers"? We will find that we usually do not pay attention to the training of inspection and maintenance personnel, or lack of evaluation of the quality and ability of inspection and maintenance personnel. Finding these problems and gaps gives us the direction of management improvement, such as formulating and implementing specific training plans to improve the skills of inspection and maintenance personnel; or through evaluation, the replacement of personnel who are not qualified for existing positions.

Finally, it should also be specially reminded that the improvement measures formulated should not be generalized, but should be specific and operable. For example, for "insufficient capacity of maintenance workers", the rectification measures formulated can not only "strengthen the training of inspection and maintenance personnel", so that there is no specific content of the measures, it is easy to fall short, to be specific to "how to strengthen", such as "in the third quarter, organized by the equipment department, for the inspection and maintenance personnel, the training of the content of the maintenance procedures, training time of 3 days", or "by the equipment department within a week to develop a specific training plan". In addition, we must also pay attention to the tracking and implementation of various rectification measures.