Industrial businesses are under growing pressure to achieve operational excellence while ensuring the safety of their workforce and managing costs. Compliance with legal regulations is a crucial requirement, and financial constraints pose a real challenge. This article explores the benefits of connected technology in streamlining safety processes and enhancing worksite efficiency.

Connected technology, facilitated by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), allows for the collection and analysis of real-time data from digitally connected devices. This data, coupled with advanced analytics, can significantly improve organizational productivity, compliance, and safety performance. One of the most critical advantages is the ability to reduce response time to life-threatening incidents.

Studies conducted on-site have shown that incidents are resolved in the shortest time when using connected technology. Traditional methods may take up to 3½ hours to respond to an incident, resulting in unfortunate outcomes such as the recovery of a body when dealing with toxic gas exposure. However, with connected technology, a worker can be rescued in less than 5 minutes, potentially saving their life.

In addition to improving response time, connected technology supports environmental, social, and governance efforts within organizations. It enables capabilities like plume-dispersion modeling to prevent downstream effects and location tracking to easily locate and retrieve lost devices. This contributes to the protection of people and communities.

Overall, research indicates that a more digital environment leads to enhanced competitiveness, compliance, and performance. Connected technology enables higher quality and quicker decision-making, fosters transparency and collaboration, and improves efficiency. It also helps achieve better outcomes, including the reduction of carbon emissions to net zero and, most importantly, saving lives.

SPE members can access the complete paper, titled “Improving Safety and Efficiency through Connected Technology,” for free from SPE’s Health, Safety, Environment, and Sustainability Technical Discipline page from 14 September to 27 September. The paper can be found on OnePetro under the reference SPE 210932.