e-Permit To Work System for Industries

I have worked in a petrochemicals complex during its commissioning. While I grasp the need and importance of a Permit To Work system, I feel that the system is very basic and requires a boost of 21st century gadgetry to help implement it more effectively and stringently.

A sample permit to work can be viewed here.

A 'permit to work', 'work permit' or 'permit' is a signed consent given by the in-charge of a particular plant to the party carrying out some repair or maintenance work in this plant. This permit to work enlists the details of the equipment, the nature of the work to be carried out and the agency carrying out the work, the time for which this permit is valid, the safety precautions to be taken before carrying out the work, the names of the issuing, receiving and the approving personnel and renewal and closing details of the permit. Every issued permit has to be renewed if the enlisted jobs are not completed and have to be closed after the work is completed. The idea is that the issuing personnel will inspect the work area along with the receiving personnel before issuing the permit. He will mark down his observations and any special requirements specific to the job to be carried out and then issue the permit on site. This later has to be approved by the approving authority.

 Existing Flow Chart

What actually happens is that the receiver will try to locate the issuer who usually is the engineer in-charge of a particular area. Since this engineer-in-charge is in-charge of a number of areas instead of just one he may or may not be present in the area where the receiver has to carry out the job. In most of the cases the issuer issues a permit sitting in the office where the permit books are maintained and stored, based on trust, without ever inspecting the area where the work is to be carried out in order to avoid carrying the messy carbon paper and the different permit books which are heavy. The issuer has to maintain a separate register to keep track of open and closed permits. The receiver has to then locate the approving personnel who is never available in the same office. By the time the permits are issued its already 2 precious hours of the day wasted before which the job can be started. And since this 2 hour delay is so common the receiver secretly already tells his men to starts that job in the area before even getting the permit issued. And since this is a preventive measure its usefulness is realized only in case of a rare accident rather than in more frequent safe completion of jobs. So, basically there are more deterrents in the effective implementation of the Permit To Work system, than there are encouragements.

A list of some of the main deterrents and shortfalls in the systems at present:

1. Using carbon paper for making copies, dates back to the age of typewriters and results in erroneous and illegible entries
2. Making 3 copies for each permit issued is a waste of paper
3. Handling three permit books for Working at height, Cold work (regular work) and Hot work (involving welding, grinding, cutting etc)
4. Delay caused by traveling to the site and coming back to the office to issue the permit.
5. Delay as a result of unavailability of approving personnel
6. Often by-passing the site inspection before issue of permit
7. Maintaining a register to keep track of renewals and closure of permits
8. Keeping track of permit books in stock and sending them for printing again and again
9. Predetermined times at which the permits are issued (say in between 10:00-10:30 in A shifts only.
10. Minor details being missed out due to manual entry
11. Maintaining records of permits on paper and in books for 3 years requires a lot of space
12. Immediate issue of emergency maintenance permits is not possible
13. There is no information to Overall Plant In-charge  in case permits are issued, renewed or closed, thereby rendering him clueless about the work being carried out under his shift in various areas of the factory.

I came up with the idea of making this process all electronic for industries. For that we need

The Gadgetry

1. Central Server for Permit To Work System
2. Tablet PCs with a camera, WiFi and NFC capability
3. A touch-input friendly application designed for the table
4. Integration of this system with the e-mail server for immediate notifications

 This is how the system would work.

New Flow Chart

The receiver has to ask the issuer to be present at the area where he intends to carry out some work. The Issuer carries his tablet PC to the plant in question. The Issuer opens the application on the tablet PC and selects the type of permit that is to be issued (Hot, Cold or Height). He enters the details of the job to be carried out. He goes through the checklist and enters his observations. He clicks a time and location stamped picture of the area he has inspected, which is the area where the work is going to be carried out. If any point is not conforming to the checklist or the minimum requirements to be taken care of for that particular job, the form can be saved to continue later when the necessary requirements are met. He digitally signs the permit by touching his ID card (NFC based) to the NFC port thereby signing the permit. He then asks the receiver to sign the permit digitally using his ID card. After these two signatures a serial number will be generated and the e-Permit will be sent to the Central (PTW) Server which then communicates with  the e-mail server of the organization which sends an e-mail notification to the approving authority. The e-mail will have the e-Permit form with the pictures of the locations that was generated in the tablet PC.The approving authority can finally approve the permit by sending back a confirmatory reply or the opposite. Renewals can be carried out on request with provision for additional details and pictures to be added during renewal.

Using this new scheme organizations can not only implement the PTW system effectively with much ease but can also bring in a system to keep track of the kinds of permits being issued and the frequent areas where these permits are being issued to find out the cause of recurrence of similar problems which are being rectified. Definitely opens new doors.