Safety business

Dedicated to Industrial Chemical Safety—Business Plan for the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, August 1997. An attachment to a memo provided by the Chemical Manufacturers Association. 

More sophisticated FMEAs examine the level of concern over various hazards in terms of GxP criticality. Figure 8.9 describes how to determine three levels of concern low, medium, and high. The decision tree presented considers only the impact on drug product quality. Some pharmaceutical and healthcare companies may want to include operator safety, business impact, and even the GAMP categories of software affected in their determination of these levels of concern. ... 

The process safety business is permeated with regulations, rules, codes, and standards. And these rules are important—one large oil company estimated that 80% of its incidents in the year 2006 could have been avoided had workers simply followed the rules. Yet, although compliance with the rules helps ensure a high level of safety performance, it can also induce a false sense of confidence when it comes to safety— particularly catastrophic accidents. Such false confidence is based on an assumption that the occurrence of all possible incident scenarios has been anticipated by the writers of the rules and regulations. Such an assumption is, of course, highly unlikely to be correct, not least because most serious accidents are unusual, even weird. 

The advent of inexpensive, high quality digital cameras has had a dramatic impact on the process safety business. With regard to hazards analysis reports, pictures can help illustrate the findings and issues discussed. If the team was concerned with the high failure rate of a pump seal, e.g., a picture of that seal will help everyone understand what is being described. 

The fourth section— Management (Chapters 17—20)—provides guidance to do with the management of a risk program, including project management and the attributes of a professional working in the process safety business. 

Much of this is also changing with international lending organizations such as the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank requiring environmental risk assessments to be conducted as part of the development project. Many countries now have their own local risk assessment experts and are not as dependent on outside expertise as they formerly were. One thing is sure safety does save money. Throughout this book, you can see numerous examples and sources of cost-benefit to safety. Businesses attribute this to better preventative safety management systems. 

Looking at a single segment, such as ISO 9001 alone, does not reveal the entire DNA of an organization. Additional standards to cover other segments such as the environment, occupational health and safety, business risk, and social... 

The use of these techniques is an important element of industrial policy since they contribute to the creation of a business friendly regulatory environment allowing the combination of measures taken for internal organisational reasons and obligations of certification without lowering the level of safety to be achieved. Wlienever possible a choice between product control and quality assurance procedures is offered to manufacturers. 

Sensors form a very broad-based, multihilHon doUar business. Detailed information and predictions of the growth in the many sensor subftelds can be found in the Hterature (39). Eor example, the relatively narrow area of acceleration and vibrations sensors was a 600 million business in 1995 and projected to become a 1 biUion business by the end of the twentieth century. New appHcations, often driven by regulatory and safety concerns, mean projected growth of just about every sensor type. 

It is incumbent upon the toller to develop and follow internal management systems as appropriate to support business needs, production needs, process safety, environmental responsibility, and worker health. The selection process should have considered whether or not satisfactory systems are in place. Nevertheless, the contract or auxiliary documents may be the vehicle used to help ensure that the system reviewed is the system actually used for completing the toll in question. Within the process safety management system, the management of change and training elements are essential subsystems. 

Considering the merchant nature of the tolling business, these informal communications must still respect the confidentiality concerns and restrictions on both parties. While specific experience in allied technologies often may not be disclosed, it is incumbent on both parties to establish means to convey critical safety issues without disclosure of otherwise confidential information. 

We have already seen elements of the CA approach when considering the costs due to safety critical failures. A further insight into the way that failure costs can be estimated for non-safety critical failures is also used to support the CA methodology. Estimates for the costs of failure in this category are based on the experiences of a sample of industrial businesses and published material as follows. 

To apply inherent safety appropriately, research chemists must make an in-depth investigation into the process chemistry and into the entire process that may develop based on that chemistry. An adequate investigation necessitates input from a diverse team of people, including research chemists and business, engineering, safety, environmental personnel. They must consider the impact that the use of a particular process chemistry will have on a wide range of populations. These include the ultimate customer of the product, process operating personnel, the general public, and potentially impacted plant and animal populations. To chose the "inherently safest chemistry, the team needs to take into account ... 

---