The Chemical and Downstream Oil Industries Forum, almost always called CDOIF, is a UK collaborative body that brings the regulators (the Health and Safety Executive, the Environment Agency, SEPA, and the Office for Nuclear Regulation), the technical institutes (the Energy Institute, EEMUA, and IChemE), industry operators, and the trade unions around one table to agree common process safety good practice. It is not a standards body and its guidelines are not law, but they sit just beneath formal standards as agreed, authoritative consensus guidance.
For functional safety work, the CDOIF output that earns its keep is the guideline Functional Safety Management of Installed Safety Instrumented Systems. We at SIL Safe point clients to it constantly, because it is purpose-built for legacy and operating SIS, the brownfield reality most plants actually live in, rather than clean-sheet design. It is also one of the few authoritative sources that walks through both the assessment and the audit side with worked checklists. It carries real weight too: the COMAH Competent Authority leans on CDOIF guidance when inspecting, so in UK practice treating it as optional is a mistake.
Key Points
- CDOIF is a UK consensus forum, not a regulator or a standards body; its output is agreed good practice that sits just below formal standards.
- Its Functional Safety Management of Installed Safety Instrumented Systems guideline is purpose-built for legacy and operating SIS and covers both functional safety assessment and audit with worked checklists.
- UK inspectors under COMAH lean on CDOIF guidance, so it carries practical weight well beyond its non-statutory status.
Example
A UK operator running a 1990s-vintage burner management system cannot produce the design-phase functional safety assessment that IEC 61511 expects of a new SIS. Following the CDOIF installed-SIS guideline, they instead build a prior-use and functional safety management case for the existing equipment and work through the guideline’s audit checklist, giving the COMAH inspector the legacy demonstration they are looking for.
See Also: functional safety management, FSA, RAGAGEP
Cited Sources
- CDOIF, Functional Safety Management of Installed Safety Instrumented Systems (Chemical and Downstream Oil Industries Forum guideline)
- IEC 61511-1:2016, Clause 5 (Functional safety management)