Insights

Functional Safety Webinar Series: Recordings & Key Takeaways

Strengthen your Process Safety Management (PSM) program and ensure your safety instrumented systems (SIS) truly deliver the risk reduction your risk analyses assume. Our three-part Functional Safety webinar series is now complete, and the slides and recordings are available for all sessions.

About the Series

Many PSM programs document safeguards thoroughly but stop short of verifying whether SIS actually meet their required performance. This webinar series focused on connecting PHA, Mechanical Integrity (MI), Management of Change (MOC), and audit activities to a coherent, IEC 61511-aligned functional safety lifecycle.

Led by Charlie Souza, MSEE, PE, PMP, CAP, Functional Safety & ICS Cybersecurity Lead at AcuTech, the sessions offered practical, management-focused guidance on turning compliance-driven PSM programs into measurable, performance-based functional safety programs.

Webinar 1: Functional Safety for Process Safety Managers

Date: March 31, 2026
Focus: Verifying Risk Reduction Credit for PHA Safeguards

In this session, participants learned how to trace SIS requirements back to hazard analysis, link them to MI and MOC, and create a defensible, standards-aligned safety lifecycle.

Key takeaways:

  • How to ensure safeguards deliver the risk reduction assumed in PHAs
  • Practical questions to ask teams for verifiable functional safety
  • Roadmap to move from “PSM-compliant” to functionally safe
Access the Slides   Watch the Webinar

Webinar 2: Beyond PSM Audits – Functional Safety Assessments

Date: April 21, 2026
Focus: Exposing Hidden SIS Risks with Functional Safety Assessments (FSAs)

Traditional PSM audits confirm safeguards are documented and tested but often miss hidden risks. This session showed how FSAs validate SIS lifecycle implementation against IEC 61511. It covered SRS quality, SIL verification, proof testing, and MOC.

Key takeaways:

  • Identify hidden SIS risks commonly overlooked in PSM audits
  • Transform audit findings into actionable improvement plans
  • Position FSAs as value-adding, not bureaucratic
Access the Slides   Watch the Webinar

Webinar 3: From PSM to Performance – Your Functional Safety Deep Dive

Date: May 12, 2026
Focus: Translating Risk Analysis into SIL Selection and Verification

In the third and final webinar of this series, we explored the most requested topic from the first two webinars. Translating Risk Analysis into SIL Selection and Verification. For many PSM leaders, these activities are closely related yet not always clearly connected in practice. This session translated the relationship among scenario risk ranking, target risk reduction, SIL selection, and SIL verification into plain language and explain why a high PHA risk ranking does not automatically mean a high SIL. Understand how better alignment between risk analysis and functional safety decisions can improve consistency, defensibility, and decision quality across your PSM program. This webinar explored how PHA results should inform SIL selection—and how SIL verification confirms that SIS performance matches the intended risk reduction.

Key takeaways:

  • The relationship among PHA risk ranking, LOPA, SIL selection, and SIL verification — and why these steps are connected but not interchangeable
  • How to use risk analysis results to drive SIL targets that are consistent, defensible, and grounded in your actual hazard scenarios
  • What SIL verification is really confirming — and why it is the closing link between your risk reduction assumptions and your SIS design
Access the Slides   Watch the Webinar

Why Functional Safety Matters

Across the series, attendees learned how to:

  • Verify that SIS safeguards achieve intended risk reduction
  • Connect PHA, MI, and MOC activities to a coherent safety lifecycle
  • Use Functional Safety Assessments to enhance PSM audits
  • Align SIL verification with operational and audit data

This series is ideal for process safety managers, PHA teams, SIS engineers, and audit professionals seeking to strengthen their functional safety programs.

For questions or guidance on applying these insights in your facility, contact us at contact@acutech-consulting.com.

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