Communication appropriate metrics

As discussed in Chapter 7, metrics should be tailored for the intended or required improvements. The metrics communication plan should be designed to deliver appropriate information to intended audiences so they can make good decisions. This chapter discusses the needs and techniques for communicating process safety results across the organization. Topics include selecting the appropriate metrics to share and techniques for establishing the communications strategy. 

In summary, you wantto measure the value you create for your customers. Some examples of such measures are the payback period for investments in your goods and services, the return they get on the investments they make in your goods and services, the savings they have in the total cost of ownership, and the fixed costs they can avoid by buying from you. By comparing your performance on the appropriate metrics with your competitors, you can identify where you provide superior value to your customers, and communicate that to your customers to expand your market presence. By improving your performance on the appropriate metrics over time, you can improve your maiket presence over time. 

During implementation of the metrics system, efficient and appropriate communications with stakeholders are important. A well-thought-out communications plan ensures that persoimel have the information they need to fulfill their duties. This is a two-way activity since implementation leaders need up-to-date information to appropriately manage the implementation. During implementation, periodic updates for management keep them informed and provide opportunities for management to show support and facilitate implementation. The communication analysis is an activity to determine which audience needs what information during implementation and how often to communicate. 

As the communication strategy for process safety metrics is formulated, consider various factors to ensure that the communications are appropriate and effective. Such characteristics include ... 

A process safety program must be relevant to the company and its operations. The program must also be relevant to employees personal safety and success. The link between safety actions and safety outcomes is most obvious in operations that directly handle highly hazardous materials. Unfortunately, that nexus may not be as obvious in the systems that support and are otherwise indirectly associated with hazardous materials. Appropriately developed, implemented, and communicated process safety metrics can help educate personnel on the importance of different aspects of the process safety system. 

The general disadvantages of the taxonomy-based metrics are that they are time consuming and that the analysis of the community composition requires identification expertise, which may not be available. According to the WFD, MS shall identify the appropriate taxonomic level for biological quality elements required to achieve adequate confidence and precision in the classification. The EU FP-5 project ECOFRAME tested a simplified taxonomic metric for phytoplankton based on the domination... 

Mass index (MI) is defined as the total mass used in a process/process step divided by the mass of product and it is approximately the E-factor plus one. A software package, the Environmental Assessment Tool for Organic Syntheses (EATOS), has been designed to calculate some of these metrics. More elaborate assessments such as life cycle assessment (LCA), could be performed, but this is also beyond the scope of this chapter. Our objective is to provide a preliminary assessment for the community to determine if further development of any guanidine organocatalysis is appropriate for use in green chemistry. 

It must be recognized that there is a substantial component of subjectivity in this analysis. Papers published in JACS have not been identified according to subfield since around 1970, so classifying and counting them involved making my own, necessarily somewhat subjective, classification. Of course, all classifications have some degree of subjectivity, but those in the other metrics involve self-identification with the subfield, which seems entirely appropriate for a study of how its status is perceived by the larger community. 

Although often neglected in the engineering community, it is widely documented that the Normal distribution, and the accompanying use of the mean and standard deviation as characterizing metrics, is not likely to be appropriate for describing the capabilities of materials used in strength- or lifetime-critical applications [e.g., 3,26-28]. It is more appropriate in these cases to use... 

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