GTE received an urgent callout from one of our valued clients in Port Hedland who were experiencing intermittent faults with a critical Safety Related Control System (SRCS), which in turn was causing ongoing production outages. Despite COVID-19 restrictions being in place at the time, our local Port Hedland based team were able to mobilise and have a resource on-Site investigating the issue within the hour. Our local resource was able to reproduce and capture the initiating event with minimal production impact, identifying the previously undiagnosed root cause and providing both short and long term recommendations for remediation. Being a SRCS, this involved leveraging our Functional Safety expertise to facilitate a preliminary safety impact analysis workshop to ensure that temporary measures could be taken to minimise production outages whilst maintaining compliance with the requirements of AS4024, AS61508 and the required safety integrity level of the system. In doing so, the clients critical asset could be immediately returned to production whilst the Functional Safety Life Cycle phases were revisited and the formal Management of Change processes enacted to revise the design and implement long term solutions.
