When the responsibility for document management is left up to the authors of information, there is a tendency to create silos of information across departments or software application information types. Information silos are a common cause for document management regulatory compliance issues. The use of uncontrolled copies of versions, revisions and formats of process safety information is often cited as the cause of workplace accidents.

Gateway’s PSI Vaulting Solution provides a consistent approach for managing Process Safety Information (PSI) to ensure regulatory compliance and audit readiness.The OSHA standard 29CFR1910.119 “Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals” identifies PSI as information pertaining to:

• Hazards of the highly hazardous chemicals in the process
• Technology of the process
• Equipment in the process
• Recognized & Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practice (RAGAGEP)

With an established PSI Vault to manage information, the incentives disappear for departments or individuals to maintain their own filing systems. By “manage” we mean:

• Store data and documents in a secure manner
• Provide authorized users the ability to read and edit access released data and documents
• Provide selected users access to historical (down-rev) data and documents
• Provide workflows or transactions for the updating of data and documents
• Provide searching across data and documents
• Provide expiry and/or retirement of data and documents that are obsolete or superseded
• Integrate with other systems to provide views of needed data and documents in those systems

The PSI Vault manages all regularly-used operating procedures, drawings, design information, equipment records, inspection records, MSDSs, and instrument records as mandated by the OSHA definition of process safety information.

More advanced vaulting systems may additionally manage operator logs, critical defeats, work orders, facility information, capital projects, change documents, training documents and records, engineering standards, VPP, schedules, audits, calendars, repair,maintenance, MOCs, PHAs, HAZOPs, PSSRs, hot work permits, and so on.