Metrics safety improvements

Chapter 9—Future Trends in the Development and Use of Process Safety Metrics for improving process safety performance and broader societal interests... 

The identification and implementation of new or improved process safety metrics alone will not improve process safety. Rather, the data must be collected, analyzed, communicated, understood, and acted upon. While metrics can highlight process safety performance strengths and weaknesses, process safety improvement comes when such efforts are directed towards achieving and maintaining desired performance by correcting weak performance. 

Clear definition of responsibilities and individual accountability are important. An individual may have the responsibility to develop and colleet metrics information but may not be accountable for the results themselves. For example, the objeetive for process safety improvement is to lower the number of ineidents, yet the individual responsible for collecting process safety incidents data may not be the person to be held responsible for an increase in incidents. The individual responsible for collecting data would, however, be responsible for the aeeuracy of the data. 

Advertising successes of the process safety improvement effort demonstrates that improvement is possible. Well-crafted stories also explain the benefits that accrue to everyone in the organization. Of particular interest are stories where a process safety weakness was observed, possibly during a process safety audit, and an improvement effort corrected the identified weakness before it could manifest into an accident. Metrics can validate such improvements. Another example is improved reliability from timely maintenance of safety devices as demonstrated by metrics that educate personnel not only about the hazards, but also about the importance of reliable safety systems in managing those hazards. 

Because there are penalties for noncompliance, companies do keep their OSHA-required metrics current, but many stop there. In Chapter 11 on metrics, I will explain how using metrics that are related to innovative safety awareness programs can measure as well as promote ongoing safety improvement. 

Metrics Defining proactive safety improvement programs and metrics will drive you toward world-class safety. 

At weekly team meetings, review team safety metric performance against target. Metrics could include number of safety observations, safety improvements, or safety JSAs completed. 

Target a number of safety improvements, safety observations, and JSA that will be completed monthly. Review metric results every week at team meeting. 

Compliance with OSHA regulations will not prevent all potential hazards in a plant. Tracking the OSHA-mandated metrics will not drive safety improvement. Both of these efforts are what companies have to do. This book was written to encourage individuals and the companies where they work to go beyond compliance. Most businesses today are somewhat lean savvy and have someone on board championing these lean efforts. This individual, armed with lean tools, can engage others and then together make a real safety difference. And safety is the no. 1 priority, right ... 

Define proactive safety improvement programs with metrics. 

Continuous Improvement. Source A New paradigm for safety and health metrics safety and health metrics framework, tools, applications, framework, tools, applications, and opportunities, Steve Newell,... 

Removing personal blame from incidents that set the stage for personal injury will enable more proactive reporting, evaluahng, and correcting. When your periodic environmental audits show less and less property damage, you can be assured you are preventing injuries. In fact, I am convinced this is actually a more reliable and valid metric for safety improvement than the standard injury and illness rates derived from employees self reports and visits to the plant infirmary. So a comprehensive safety measurement system... 

As stated previously, the MWT should be considered as one index from a set of indices for a subject or patient. Furthermore, the reason for doing an MWT evaluation is important. If the subject or patient is being evaluated as part of a fit-ness-for-duty examination in connection with a safety-sensitive job, the range of acceptable performance might be narrowed. If the subject or patient is being evaluated to determine whether an experimental intervention has improved ability to remain awake, then the focus may be shifted from average sleep latency to a metric reflective of change from baseline. 

To provide guidance to companies at corporate and site levels on how to use performance metrics effectively to improve process safety performance ... 

Process Safety Specialists—those at the corporate and facility levels responsible for the process safety system including tailoring the system to specific facilities and using metrics to monitor and maintain or improve process safety performance. 

Corporate Leaders—those providing the leadership commitment, setting the expectations, for a process safety performance and the supporting metrics system including the resources necessary to develop and implement such a program throughout the corporation to improve process safety. 

Chapter 8—Improving Industry-Wide Performance through the adoption of common process safety metrics and definitions within companies and industry sectors, and across the processing industries... 

It is hoped that process safety performance throughout the process industries will improve as an increasing number of companies adopt more extensive and more rigorous process safety metrics as part of their process safety management systems. Companies and facilities that do this should ultimately see improvement... 

The authors of the Guidelines for Risk Based Process Safety (KBPS) (CCPS, 2007a) described the need for constant vigilance as the price of maintaining an effective process safety management system. An operator not only must be vigilant (aware of both past and current performance), but must not assume that current performance will be maintained, much less improved, without intentional evaluation of critical parts of systems and their performance. Performance measurement and metrics are a critical part of the RBPS system. 

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