A Data-Driven Approach to Sustaining and Improving Your Mechanical Integrity Program

Inspectioneering Journal, July/August 2023 Issue

Running an effective mechanical integrity (MI) program is critical to sustaining successful operations. An ineffective program can significantly impact your business, ranging from lost production to overspending on maintenance and, in some cases, major loss of containment, Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE), or business risks.

An effective and competitive MI program must be anchored on data-driven decisions. We’ve seen many facilities focus more than 90% of their investments and effort on implementing step-change program improvements that will help them make more data driven decisions, such as piping programs, risk-based inspection, and integrity operating window (IOW) management. However, sustaining and incorporating these step-change improvements into the MI program and continuously improving the actual performance of these programs is challenging. Many owner-operators do not recognize the full value of their programs and waste millions of dollars implementing improvements that do not impact their bottom line.

Our recent Inspectioneering webinar, “A Data-Driven Approach to Sustaining and Improving Your MI Program,” focused on the challenges many owner-operators have regarding the ongoing continuous improvement of their MI programs. In this article, we’re going to further explore three key elements for successfully sustaining and improving your MI program:

1. Begin step-change improvements with the end in mind.
2. Incorporate comprehensive analytics that drive sustainable decisions.
3. Build your MI program to get smarter over time.