Inspection Manual

Optimization tool

The Inspection Manual is the tool allowing the optimization of the maintenance of your installations, i.e. :

Increase the production time,

Control risks,

Reduce the maintenance costs.

The Inspection Manual is not only the essential guide for the maintenance of your installations, but first of all a work method, a global approach that can be summed up in 4 words :

Master instead of suffer

To let you know more about the Inspection Manual, a simplified presentation of the problems it addresses and its methodology is give hereafter.

The problem

Industrial installations are confronted to problems of chemical and mechanical degradations, which are particularly critical in the oil, chemical and petrochemical industries.

These phenomena generate important risks and costs, because they can lead to serious accidents and production shutdowns. The name "Seveso" illustrates it all.

Being aware of this problem, national and European authorities have adopted measures aiming at the limitation of risks in this kind of installation. Cautiously, required standards are severe and compel to frequent inspections, without making the difference between equipments, leading to production shutdowns, which generates important extra costs.

However, authorities may alleviate these systematic inspection plans, when the concerned company presents "smart" inspection plans, resulting from an objective and quantitative approach.

API581 recommended practice (API = American Petroleum Institute) and RBI approach (Risk Based Inspection) were developed in this context. They aim at planning inspections as a function of criticality of equipments (the concomitant evaluation of the probability of occurrence of a failure, and the consequence of this failure). The main drawbacks of these approaches are their complexity, making them difficult to set up, and their lack of synthetic view: they examine every equipment, taking into account neither their connections (piping), nor the production process in its whole.

To address these drawbacks, SEM developed a global approach, using RBI standards in a more practical way.

The method developed by S.E.M.

This method is based on API standards and other methodologies developed in international companies.

The CBI approach is a living methodology that demands an appropriate follow-up. The periodicity is based on the operation cycle, generally between 6 and 10 years.

The description of the RBI method will be available soon.