In 1994, the year “The Lion King” ruled at the box office, PHA-Pro roared its way into the marketplace and quickly became the pride and joy of process safety professionals around the globe.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, PHA-Pro remains at the top of the process hazard software food chain. And there’s good reason for that. It allows users to track their Hazard and Operability, or HAZOP, Layers of Protection Analysis, or LOPA, and other Process Hazard Analysis assessments with unparalleled ease and accuracy.
But as with any complex piece of software, there are aspects of PHA-Pro that might not be as well-known. Here are four of them:
4 Things You Don’t Know About PHA-Pro
- 1) Can You See Your Risk Profile Clearly? PHA-Pro can be configured to include any heat map template. It’s an option that is often underused but we can’t overstate how important it is. A heat map is essentially a copy of a risk matrix with the number of hazards in a study for each combination of severity and likelihood superimposed on top. This gives people an overview as to the distribution of their current risks across their risk ranking system. These are commonly used in many areas to gain better insight into the risks of an operation, and to help with mitigation planning.
- 2) Take Action on Chemical Interactions: Some chemicals just don’t play well together, so it’s important to determine how each material will interact/react in a risk assessment. People commonly build chemical interaction matrices in spreadsheets, but these can also be built in PHA-Pro. Taking it one step further, Sphera’s dependency matrices and data mirroring features can automatically push material combinations to a risk assessment worksheet for a deeper analysis.
- 3) Critical Control Need-to-Know: It goes without saying that PHA-Pro risk assessment recommendations are collected in a master list and can be linked to individual scenarios for easier follow-up and implementation, but many people don’t realize that this setup can be easily translated to safeguards in a risk assessment. By collecting safeguards in a master list, they can be extracted for easier management as part of a “Critical Controls Register.” The “Places Used” function can give great insight into where controls are used, how often they are used and how important they are to the overall risk management effort.
- 4) A Mistake Double-Take: Mistakes can happen to anyone, but when there’s risk involved, mistakes can be dangerous. Many people forget that there are many functions included in PHA-Pro that can allow users to be warned when they have made mistakes or errors in their risk assessments. Conditional formatting can highlight data or even disable entry based on specified conditions, and the formula tools can be used to create error messages that warn users when things have gone awry. The same tools can also be used with print filters to create summary reports of errors and issues that can be easily reviewed by risk managers.