The follow-up of safety functions in industrial operations is fundamentally driven by regulatory and compliance requirements. These requirements establish the minimum acceptable level of performance and provide an essential basis for safe operation.
The introduction of Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) for safety functions creates an opportunity to go beyond this minimum. By using tools such as SPAS and other monitoring systems, operators can continuously assess actual equipment and safety function performance, compare measured performance against defined requirements, identify deviations, and monitor how conditions develop over time.
This distinction is important.
Compliance asks whether a requirement is met today. CBM also asks what the condition is telling us about tomorrow.
A safety function may be fully compliant while its performance is gradually deteriorating. If this degradation can be identified early, corrective actions can be planned and implemented before the condition develops into a critical fault. This early insight also allows corrective actions to be planned and implemented at a time that best fits operational schedules, rather than being driven by unexpected failures or emergency situations.
This provides two significant benefits:
- Improved plant safety through earlier identification and mitigation of developing risks.
- Increased production uptime by reducing the probability of unexpected failures and unplanned shutdowns, and planned implementation of corrections
The challenge of a compliance-driven mindset
The full value of CBM may not be realized if condition information is evaluated primarily through a compliance-oriented mindset.
In a traditional compliance framework, the central question is often whether equipment or a safety function remains within its defined acceptance criteria. If the answer is yes, continued operation may be considered acceptable.
From a CBM perspective, however, this is only part of the picture.
Consider a safety function that remains within its acceptance criterion but shows a clear and persistent degradation trend. A compliance assessment may correctly conclude that the function is still acceptable. A CBM assessment should additionally ask:
Why is the performance deteriorating, how quickly is it deteriorating, and what are the consequences of allowing the degradation to continue?
This creates an important distinction between acceptance and condition.
When the primary objective of an analysis becomes demonstrating compliance, there is a risk that attention is directed toward confirming that the current condition remains acceptable rather than understanding the underlying degradation mechanism. This does not necessarily represent an error in the compliance assessment. Rather, it reflects a difference in purpose.
When compliance becomes the primary performance objective, significant effort may be directed toward finding assumptions, statistical methods or interpretations that demonstrate that continued operation can still be justified. The assessment may be technically defensible, but if its main purpose is to avoid corrective action rather than understand and manage the developing condition, its preventive value is limited.
The consequence may be that known degradation is allowed to continue because continued operation can still be statistically justified, even when the remaining margin is small or uncertain.The consequence may be that known degradation is allowed to continue because an acceptance limit has not yet been exceeded. The equipment remains compliant, but the available operating margin is gradually reduced and the probability of future failure may increase.
This is contrary to the fundamental objective of Condition-Based Maintenance: to use knowledge about actual condition and developing degradation to intervene before failures occur.
Compliance is the baseline — not the target
CBM should therefore not replace or weaken compliance requirements. Compliance remains a fundamental prerequisite for safe operation.
However, being compliant should be regarded as the minimum acceptable condition, not necessarily the optimal maintenance decision.
Effective CBM requires decisions to consider more than the current acceptance status. They should also consider:
- actual equipment condition;
- degradation trends and rate of change;
- uncertainty in measurements and predictions;
- remaining margin to acceptance limits;
- consequences of further deterioration; and
- the operational opportunity and cost of early intervention compared with later corrective action.
This changes the decision-making perspective.
Instead of asking only:
“Is this compliant?”
the organization should also ask:
“What is the condition telling us, where is it heading, and what action should we take now to prevent a future problem?”
From reactive acceptance to proactive management
The transition to Condition-Based Maintenance is therefore not only a technical change. It also requires a change in mindset.
Monitoring systems and analytical tools can provide increasingly accurate information about equipment condition, but the value of that information depends on how it is used. If condition data is used primarily to demonstrate continued compliance, much of the preventive potential of CBM is lost.
The objective should instead be to use compliance requirements as the safety baseline and condition information as a basis for proactive decision-making.
Compliance tells us whether we can continue operating. CBM should help us determine whether continuing without intervention is the right decision.
By making this distinction part of the organization’s maintenance and safety culture, CBM can deliver its intended benefits: earlier intervention, reduced operational risk, fewer unexpected failures, improved plant safety, and increased production uptime.
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