HIMA Asia Pacific wins major safety award

HIMA has been named the Best Process Safety Systems Provider at the Asian Manufacturing Awards 2016, held in Singapore.

In accepting the award, Friedhelm Best, vice president, Asia Pacific Region, said, “Although HIMA is originally a German business, we recognise the importance of local operations, which is why we have had offices in Asia — in Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Australia — for many years. To strengthen our presence, we recently opened a new office in Singapore to serve as our Asia–Pacific hub. Our growth plans include building a team in Singapore to support the region and to bring the expertise from our headquarters in Germany closer to our customers.”

HIMA’s award in the Process Safety Systems Provider category was based on its technical excellence and long history in delivering independent industrial safety systems. One of its most significant ongoing projects in the Asia–Pacific region is Ichthys, the massive Australian liquid natural gas project, operated by INPEX. HIMA is supplying the project’s safety systems and most of the day-to-day work on the project takes place in Singapore, which is also where function tests have been conducted on more than 1200 cabinets supplied by the basic process control system (BPCS) supplier, HIMA and project partners.

HIMA offices in Singapore, China (Shanghai), South Korea (Geoje), Australia (Perth), UAE (Dubai) and Germany (Bruehl) have collaborated closely on the project, highlighting the company’s ability to bring together global project teams to execute a complex, large-scale, cross-border project. The integrated control and safety system (ICSS) for the Ichthys gas field development project includes multiple HIMA HIMax safety instrumented systems (SIS) and fire and gas systems (FGS).

Commenting on HIMA’s safety philosophy, Best said, “We are one of the few players in the market that offers an independent SIS only. We believe safety requires that safety systems be independent from the distributed control system, the DCS. That means a complete separation, rather than just separate layers within the DCS. HIMA improves manufacturing plant performance by giving plant owners safety and security. But in the event that various plant parameters, such as for pressure or temperature, are exceeded, then appropriate action is initiated and processes are shut down.”