December 7, 2018
Yokogawa Electric Corporation announced that it has reached a go-to-market agreement with Sphera Solutions, Inc., a provider of integrated risk management software and information services focusing on environmental health & safety, operational risk, and product stewardship. As of December 3, 2018, Yokogawa has been offering Sphera's risk assessment and consulting services.
Based on this agreement, Yokogawa will strengthen its risk management services covering the entire plant lifecycle, starting with the design phase for the construction or renovation of plants and proceeding through to the engineering, installation, operation, and maintenance of safety instrumented systems (SISs) for these facilities. Through this partnership, Sphera will be able to globally and seamlessly help Yokogawa's customers improve the quality of their risk assessment activities and leverage the results to develop more accurate, efficient, and productive safety management systems.
In energy and basic materials industries such as oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and iron and steel, increasing attention is being paid to the safety of plant operations as companies look for ways to improve occupational health and safety and protect the environment. Toward this end, risk assessments are performed during the design phase for the construction or renovation of plant facilities. Such assessments include the identification of hazards, assessment of potential risks, and the determination of measures for reducing those risks. Sphera's consultants are experts at helping companies comply with international risk standards and have a wealth of experience in providing risk assessment and consulting services to a wide range of industries around the world.
Via its network of companies in 61 countries, Yokogawa delivers production control systems to customers mainly in the energy and basic materials industries. Through this collaboration with Sphera, Yokogawa will also be able to provide its customers with risk assessment and consulting services.
"Through its offering of the ProSafe-RS SIS, which detects abnormal conditions in plant operations and initiates emergency actions such as a plant shutdown, Yokogawa helps its customers operate their plants safely," said Masatoshi Nakahara, a Yokogawa director, executive vice president, and head of the company's IA Systems & Service Business Headquarters. "Based on our Sustainable SIS Solution concept of taking a systematic approach to maintaining safe plant operations, we began offering related services, systems, and software packages in 2017. The results of the assessments facilitated by Sphera will be compiled in a database for use in designing SISs and evaluating their performance. This approach will be useful not only for maintaining and improving the safety of customers' plants but also for speeding up the engineering of systems and improving their performance."
Paul Marushka, Sphera's president and CEO, added: "We are very excited to be partnering with Yokogawa. We are thrilled to be able to complement Yokogawa's proven safety and operational systems with Sphera's advanced operational risk solutions and expertise. The combined solution resulting from this partnership will help optimize our clients' efforts to keep workers safe, products sustainable, and operations productive."
