Improving Mechanical Integrity

The following practices highlight how to strengthen your inspection organization, improve decision-making, and create a culture where inspectors are proactive, collaborative, and results-driven.

• • Develop and be proactive with your inspector career ladder. This will keep your inspection team hugely motivated. People want to grow!
    Have an ongoing risk based inspection (RBI) program. You can reference my book “Implementing and Evergreening RBI in Process Plants” for tips on this topic.
  • Have an RBI inspection – fitness for service (FFS) model organization. Key is to have RBI & FFS assessment capability within the inspection organization. This improves decision making quality and speed as it will encourage closer collaboration between the inspectors, corrosion and fitness for service engineers.
  • Do not track how many inspections you are doing. Track how many finds per inspection you are achieving—like a batting average but for inspectors. This will force the inspectors to do an RBI assessment and understand what to look for; how (inspection technique), where to inspect and how frequent to inspect, all before going to the field.
  • Celebrate when your inspection team makes a find requiring a repair. At one of the refineries where I worked, the inspection team had a large bell that they would ring each time an inspector found an issue; this helped foster the right culture.
  • Concentrate on your piping. At least 90% of your efforts should go to piping because in process facilities piping holds over 90% of the square footage of metal that is prone to corrosion.
  • Implement piping alert and retirement thickness criteria. A typical example is using one-tenth of an inch as the threshold value that triggers an assessment and the scheduling of monitoring and repairs. This would vary depending on the diameter of the pipe, however, there must be a minimum below which action must be taken and the minimum must not be dictated by the maximum allowable or operating pressure. If you use the maximum allowable or operating pressure you may end up justifying a thickness of 1/20 of an inch or less, simply not enough metal left to corrode and will likely develop a leak while you justify postponing a repair.
  • Enforce a sitewide policy of no overdue Inspections. It can get out of hand if you do not control this.
  • Have a dedicated leak reduction plan, including monthly or bi-weekly meetings and leak metrics reviewed by the site leadership team monthly. This focuses the site on the real target: leak reduction. Track inspectable process leaks and fires and use as both leading and lagging indicators.
  • Have a dedicated team be proactive at fixing upon finding signs of deterioration. The team should be hovering around the site with planned work. Limit these fixes to cleaning, use of coatings, grease, easy repairs of insulation. Anything more should follow the permit and planning process.

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