Cristal Global (Tronox) Reduces Risk, Saving £2.12 MM per Year Using Risk-Based Inspection

Cristal, acquired by Tronox, is one of the world’s largest producer of titanium dioxide and a leading producer of titanium chemicals. With nearly 4,000 employees over five continents, Cristal has eight titanium dioxide manufacturing plants.

How to comply with changing regulations and standards

Faced with a need to meet changing government regulations and standards, as well as corporate Process Safety Management (PSM) standards, Cristal needed a way to comply with these standards, but also calculate the risk associated with not doing so.

While implementing an asset performance management (APM) solution seemed to meet that need, the company was also challenged with convincing its global IT department that another software solution was needed to accurately monitor and maintain critical assets, as well as as calculate risk.  

Specifically, Cristal needed to meet:

• Requirements set out by the United Kingdom Accreditation Society for risk calculations
• Asset management requirements for mechanical integrity as required by the Control of Major Hazards (COMAH) regulation
• Guidelines outlined in Cristal’s five-year PSM plan submitted to Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK

Implementing a risk based inspection solution

To meet these challenges, Cristal decided to implement a risk based inspection (RBI) system at one of its facilities in Stallingborough, UK, initially, with plans to expand the program to its other sites eventually.

Cristal engineers understood that they needed to better understand plant risk levels, reduce unexpected failures on critical equipment, and demonstrate the significant value attainable through the implementation of an inspection plan that used criticality as its basis, rather than time-based inspections.

The company considered a number of possible solutions based on the technology requirements needed, including:

• A software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment option
• A semi-qualitative approach
• Ease of use, but with configurability
• Integration with SAP and OSIsoft PI, and other management tools already in use
• A mechanical integrity and thickness monitoring dashboard
• API 580 compliance

Driving continuous improvement with APM

Cristal implemented APM Integrity, an Asset Performance Management (APM) solution to drive continuous improvement.

The solution’s RBI capability enabled Cristal to:

• Implement “just-in-time” training, focusing education on the knowledge needed at different phases of implementation
• Leverage APM SaaS model to reduce up-front costs
• Reduce the risk of equipment failures by an estimated £2.12 MM per year
• Develop a 10-year projection using RBI vs. time-based inspection, which indicated a 56% reduction in required inspections
• Save an estimated £3.31 MM over 10 years in inspection costs