Dr. Michel Houtermans interviews Reinhold Bietzker of Endress+Hauser, Switzerland

IFS: Can you tell us about the kinds of products and services Endress+Hauser are involved in, as well as the relation to functional safety.

Reinhold Bietzker: Well, for a start, Endress+Hauser is a company producing a very wide range of products, starting with level, where we started off in 1953, overflow, temperature, liquid analyses and flow measurements. All devices of Endress+Hauser are designed according to the IEC 61508 regulations. The idea is to provide our customers with a big range of instruments so that they have everything available form one supplier for the normal operation of a process but also for the functional safety part. For that we need to have both the simple as well as the advanced instruments which are positioned at the critical points to prevent accidents, to prevent environmental impact and to make sure that the process is running safe and reliable.

IFS: Endress+Hauser is now almost 54 years old, but of course the functional safety industry is still relatively new. How did functional safety develop at Endress+Hauser?

Dr. Michel Houtermans interviews Ernst Schober of OMV Refining & Marketing, Austria

Rather listen to the interview? A podcast of the interview is available in German.

IFS: OMV operates in the oil & gas business. Can you tell us more about OMV as a company?

Ernst Schober: OMV is the leading energy company in the European growth belt and is active in the domains Exploration & Production, Refineries & Marketing as well as Gas & Power. OMV employs about 40’000 people and working for OMV is a lot of fun and very interesting.

IFS: Process safety is actually a big and difficult topic for all refineries worldwide. Can you tell us what approach OMV has when it comes to process safety?

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