What is your Risk?
Businesses operating in hazardous industries do so in an ever-changing environmental risk and liability landscape involving an increasingly litigious climate, a stricter regulatory environment, newly emerging risks and other factors requiring comprehensive risk management to secure assets, minimize liabilities, and protect the environment.
Digitizing operations goes a long way to address these concerns. Routine maintenance and inspections, along with proper monitoring of equipment combine to ensure proper internal safety measures and upholding adequate environmental standards.
Safety measures including prevention, preparedness, and response policies and procedures should be based on a risk assessment and safety KPIs such as injuries, accidents or incidents, near misses, and damage to improve the overall safety level. Without them, companies may face significant financial, legal, reputational, and ethical consequences, should a hazard occur.
Regardless of preventive measures taken, the risk is always present and the costs of adverse events are often devastating. Research shows that the total accumulated value of the 100 largest losses in the oil and gas industry during 1974-2015 exceeds $33 billion, while another report demonstrates that total direct damage during 2011-2015 only in Russian refineries exceeds $1.5 billion. This underscores the vitality of facility monitoring and of adequate insurance coverage plays in a commercial setting, where its role is not only life-saving but to soften the financial impact of unexpected harmful events. The total insurance risk associated with major events includes not only the value of property and income loss but the cost of environmental cleanup as a result of a spill or explosion.
For internal safety measures and insurance risk assessments alike, access to relevant and reliable data plays an essential role. Luckily, digitizing operations and leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized how organizations approach both.
How IoT Analytics Can Help Reduce Your Risk Level and Liability
As a network of connected devices with integrated sensors that can capture, collect and exchange data about how these devices are used or the environment in which they operate, IoT has enabled organizations to reduce risk and liability and propel safety to a new level.
But the benefits of IoT go well beyond safety enhancement. It allows organizations to leverage the vast amount of data captured through connected devices to lower insurance costs.
Commercial insurance is essential but often costly, particularly for those operating in a high-risk environment where expensive premiums can have a considerable impact on the company's bottom line. Commercial insurance prices are steadily rising, showing no sign of slowing – they soared 19% in Q2 2020 again, after a string of ten consecutive increasing quarters.
However, with IoT devices and analytics, organizations and insurers can work together to collect and process data to better identify, prevent and mitigate insurance risks keeping the working environment safe while benefiting from significant liability reduction.
How IoT Analytics Can Help Increase Safety
IoT Analytics can increase the safety of assets and people. The endless flow of data from IoT sensors combined with historical data allows real-time monitoring and fuels cloud-enabled predictive analytics to make sites safer by acting proactively and preventing events that could lead to a safety incident.
Predictive maintenance and remote assistance enhance facility, equipment, and environment safety
With IoT solutions, organizations can use streaming data from sensors and devices to quickly assess current conditions, recognize early warning signals, detect anomalies, deliver alerts and automatically trigger appropriate maintenance processes before damage or disruption of safety happens. For example, remote IoT sensors can prevent injury and damage arising from accidents such as explosions or pump failures by activating an alarm or shutting off machinery when a warning signal is detected.
Sensors and wearables increase personnel safety and behavioral compliance
IoT devices such as tablets, sensors, and wearables allow monitoring and reporting of personnel behaviors that may lead to accidents or equipment malfunction. Tracking the location and routes of field staff validates rounds and authenticates the information captured. Sensors can also protect personnel health and safety by tracking exposure to harmful environmental factors such as chemicals and radiation. By providing organizations greater visibility into the safety of operational environments, organizations can substantially reduce illness, injury, and fatalities.
IoT is dramatically transforming industries across the board, including how they enhance real-time risk monitoring – and how these improvements are reflected in lower premiums leading to lower insurance risk and higher ROI for organizations.
Still, regardless of IoT's remarkable applications, hazardous locations are severely restricted from benefiting from this novel technology due to the risk of spark in combustible atmospheres.
In an environment like that, not any IoT solution provider will do. Devices specifically designed to eliminate any possibility of creating a spark that could ignite a volatile environment are needed.
How Aegex Technologies Enhances Safety
Globally certified under the highest standards of safety for some of the most hazardous environments, Aegex Intrinsically Safe Tablet and NexVu IoT sensors allow organizations to collect, share and manage real-time data in hazardous locations, minimizing time lag, errors, and other safety and security risks.
These unique IoT devices enable risk and liability reduction by allowing organizations to:
