Integrity Operating Windows and Management of Change for Pressure Equipment Integrity

Introduction

In the first article in this series entitled How to Put It All Together – Guide to Organizing a Successful PEI Program, I provided an overview of the necessary Management Systems (MS) for a successful program to achieve excellence in pressure equipment integrity (PEI). This is the third article in that series. For purposes of review (or for those who did not see the original article in the Sept/Oct, 2009 edition of the Inspectioneering Journal (IJ), and in order to set the stage for this follow-on article, I will repeat directly below, some of the same introduction included in the first article. The second article in the series covered Management Leadership and Support for PEI (4), and appeared in the Jan/Feb, 2010 edition of the IJ. For those who would rather not review the introductory material, you can skip directly to the third section of this article which is labeled The PEI Stool.

Knowing what needs to be accomplished in order to achieve excellence in pressure equipment integrity (PEI) is one thing, but knowing how to organize it all for success is quite another. I have previously written numerous articles for the IJ about what all needs to be accomplished in a PEI program (1-2). In this article (and several more articles to come with more details) I will show how to organize all this “PEI stuff” to achieve overall success in order to make sure that everything that needs to be accomplished, is accomplished, using management systems (MS) and work process (WP) descriptions effectively. Without an effective organizational strategy for PEI, many of the 101 essential elements of PEI (1) can “drop between the chairs” because there may be no management systems (MS) in place to make sure that each element of PEI gets properly planned, scheduled and completed at appropriate intervals by a responsible party. However with an effective PEI MS in place, each site should be able to maintain pressure equipment integrity (i.e. no breaches of containment) and to achieve pressure equipment reliability (i.e. having pressure equipment available to function as designed to meet the business plan), both of which comprise PEI excellence.