Paul Tours, Associate Director of Solutions Consultants at Wolters Kluwer Enablon, asks a question about industrial dashboards: when a system says a safety barrier is healthy, what evidence supports that claim? He opens with an incident counter that appeared to show current information but was actually 13 days behind because of the reporting process. A clear display, he argues, does not necessarily provide a current picture of conditions on site.
The same problem becomes more consequential in process safety. A barrier status may draw on control systems that update in seconds, permits managed by shift, inspection findings that remain open for weeks and audits reviewed over months. Each activity has an owner and a valid purpose, but the information does not arrive on the same schedule. Before relying on a status to make a decision, teams need to know where its evidence came from, how old it is and whether anything important is missing.
Paul explains that connecting these systems is only part of the work. Engineers and operators also understand relationships that the data alone may not capture, such as when an unresolved finding should affect a permit or when a training gap should prevent an activity. Making that knowledge visible alongside the evidence helps people assess a barrier’s condition during daily work, rather than discovering a problem later in a review.
He describes work across multiple sites where bringing maintenance and barrier information together helped teams identify issues earlier and discuss them during shift handovers. For Paul, the value lies in giving process safety, operations and maintenance a shared view of what needs attention, who owns it and why.
Watch the full presentation to explore Paul’s examples and his approach to checking the evidence behind operational decisions.
Speaker
- Paul Tours, Associate Director of Solutions Consultants, Wolter Kluwer Enablon
