With over 30 years of automation experience under his belt, Stephane Boily knows his stuff. And that’s by design. Stephane has a passion for knowledge and a penchant for learning complex concepts – even if he only has two days to do it.

In 1999, Stephane was the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) lead for a project in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. It was there that one of the project managers approached him about the safety integrity of their facility. Stephane had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out the project manager didn’t either.

It was a Friday morning and Stephane was asked to prepare a few slides on functional safety to present the following Monday morning. He got straight to work. He borrowed a functional safety book from a colleague and devoured it.

“I read the book over the weekend and then did the presentation on the following Monday. And the rest is history. I became the de facto expert on safety systems where I was working at the time and stayed involved with it since,” says Stephane.

A lot has changed in the 20 years since Stephane’s focus shifted to functional safety. But some things haven’t changed enough, says Stephane, like the lack of education and awareness around the importance of functional safety.  “The tendency is for people to think that functional safety is expensive. To quote one famous author and engineer…‘If you think safety is expensive, try having an accident.’”

What is functional safety, exactly? In terms of the process industry, segments like oil and gas, chemical, food and beverage, mining, cement and metallurgy, the process is controlled by systems like PLCs and Distributed Control Systems (DCSs). The purpose of those control systems is to keep the process running smoothly. But sometimes things happen, and the process starts running not so smoothly.

“Functional Safety is essentially about having these instrumented systems that will take action when the process gets out of control, because the process control system can't control it properly anymore, and will bring it to a safe state. And if the safety system itself fails, then it will fail in a safe manner,” Stephane says. “So, put simply, functional safety is about designing systems that can bring the process to a safe state and that will themselves fail safely.”

Stephane has found great fulfilment and success championing functional safety throughout his career. “I love functional safety because, first of all, I love making things to protect people, protect the environment and, hopefully, have viable businesses so that their assets are protected as well,” says Stephane. “But, I also love to build teams. That's one of my roles and mandates here at True North—to build a team of functional safety experts and specialists—and that drives me.”