VALVE MAGAZINE Summer 2025

CASE STUDY: SIS MANAGEMENT TRANSFORMED

When it comes to digital transformation , re ning and processing operators face unique challenges. Unlike other industries that are already leveraging digital twins to improve design, enable predictive maintenance and boost operational e ciency, the re ning and processing sectors often struggle with data management. Many facilities have accumulated vast quantities of data over decades, some dating back over half a century. This data is often scattered across departments, locked in outdated formats and managed by tools from di erent generations. Such fragmentation makes digital transformation complex, as updating one document can render others outdated, creating uncertainty about which version is accurate. “Everyone is looking to digitalization, but in re ning, it is not that simple,” says Nagappan Muthiah, P.E, CFSE, Phillips safety instrumented systems lead for industrial control systems. Muthiah and his team at Phillips were tasked with leading the digital transformation of the company’s Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS). Their mission: identify the best way to consolidate decades of dispersed and inconsis tent safety data into a smarter, more practical system. This innovative solution aims to eliminate data silos, deliver enterprise-wide visibility and bring greater clarity to safety lifecycle management. The reality of digitalization in refining Headquartered in Houston, Phillips operates nine re neries and initially set out to pursue full lifecycle digitalization when it began its digital journey over ve years ago. This would allow it to replicate its entire safety system digitally from front-end design through to commissioning. In theory, the process would deliver enormous savings in both time and money: design one unit, press a button and replicate it across sites. “As much as it was intellectually satisfying to conceptualize the digitization of the entire process, including front-end design to operation and maintenance,” Muthiah says, “we quickly realized that the ROI just wasn’t there.” The true opportunity wasn’t in digitizing front-end design data but in focusing on operations, maintenance and safety performance data of the existing assets. Phillips made a strategic decision to reorient its digita lization e orts around SIS during the operations and main tenance (O&M) phase — where proactive decisions directly impact reliability, uptime and safety. This approach aligned with guidance from the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) Recommended Practice , which classi es safety metrics into four tiers. While Tier and Tier re ect incidents that have already occurred, Tier metrics act as leading indicators, revealing that a safety protection system was activated to prevent a potential event. “Before we started utilizing our SIL system (safety integrity level), our safety data lived in siloed digital formats,” Muthiah explains. “You could read it, but tracking, comparing or inte grating this safety design basis was much harder.”

CASE STUDY: From Safety Silos to Strategic Insights: SIS Management Transformed

Phillips 66 charts a clear path for downstream and processing operations turning decades of data into actionable, digital insights for safety, operations and uptime.

BY GREG RANKIN

From documentation to real-time decision support Phillips ’s safety lifecycle tool, SIL Solver Enterprise, was

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VALVE MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2025