Safety Management System operators

The UK government enquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 has had a significant impact on working practices and equipment and has helped to improve offshore safety around the world. One result has been the development of a Safety Management System (SMS) which is a method of integrating work practices, and is a form of quality management system. Major oil companies have each developed their own specific SMS, to suit local environments and modes of operation, but the SMS typically addresses the following areas (recommended by the Cullen Enquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster) ... 

The audit team, through its systematic analysis, should document areas that require corrective action as well as where the process safety management system is effective. This provides a record of the audit procedures and findings and serves as a baseline of operation data for future audits. It will assist in determining changes or trends in future audits. 

This book addresses the design, development, and installation of process safety management systems, but does not address subsequent operation and maintenance of those systems. The book s goal is to help you put together a workable, effective program and put it in place within your com pany or plant. 

By year-end 1995 we will have implemented a fully integrated process safety management system throughout our worldwide operations. 

Develop specific process safety management systems. Working within the pian, the task groups will develop specific systems and procedures for implementing PSM. The Division A team will focus on its own operations, while (name s) group will direct its efforts toward the other divisions. 

The Task Force s mission is to design a state-of-the-art process safety management system that will support all of Company X s varied business operations, and to install it at a pilot site to be determined. The team will maintain ongoing communication with Division C s Facility Managers Council, which has accepted responsibility for focusing on the division s process safety management systems. 

The book begins with a discussion of the theories of error causation and then goes on to describe the various ways in which data can be collected, analyzed, and used to reduce the potential for error. Case studies are used to teach the methodology of error reduction in specific industry operations. Finally, the book concludes with a plan for a plant error reduction program and a discussion of how human factors principles impact on the process safety management system. 

These process safety management systems help ensure that facilities are designed, constructed, operated, and maintained with appropriate controls in place to prevent serious accidents. However, despite these precautions, buildings close to hazardous process plants have presented serious risks to the people who work in them. This observation is prompted by the fact that some buildings, because of their design and construction, have collapsed when subjected to comparatively moderate accidental explosions, with serious injury or fatality to the occupants. Conversely, experience indicates that personnel located outdoors and away from such buildings, if subjected to the same blast, may have a lower likelihood of serious injury or fatality. 

Using the 7-stage protocol, the previous accidents can be explained and causal weaknesses in the safety management system of the company can be identified, i.e. the identified latent conditions on the tactical and operational control levels. To test the working of the developed protocol further, in the next Chapter practice will be approached from hindsight to verify whether other accidents can also be explained. If this is a success, practice will be approached pro-actively. 

The conclusions for company B are similar to company A in that safety was ignored from several individual or local standpoints, mainly by product quality and cost constraints, lack of historical information about deviations and lack of experienced people. This contributes to the main weakness of the safety management system, which are a lack of overview of deviations, their underlying latent conditions and of their influences on the safety barriers in the operational process. 

Many companies have implemented a system to have peers observe and try to correct the behavior of peers by coaching or other means. This is part of a behavior based safety management system. This system should operate in the nonincident portion of the error pyramid. Include examples in a listing, such as Table 5-1, to illustrate the differences. 

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. 

In this chapter we will emphasize system upsets or abnormal situations where the loss or degradation of components or controls could allow process parameters to exceed the design intent or limit of the process or equipment, resulting in an accidental chemical release. The time factor involved in an operator s ability to assess and correct an operating deviation is discussed in more detail in CCPS Guidelines for Integrating Human Factors into Process Safety Management Systems ... 

The need to keep procedures up-to-date and accurate is a theme that mns throughout this book. Chapter 2 clearly shows that document control is a key element of process safety, environmental responsibihty, and quality. A workable Process Safety Management system requires that you control the access, review, approval, revision, and maintenance of procedures. If your plant has a Total Quality Management System in place, such as ISO 9000, document control for operating and maintenance procedures is essential to keep your certification current. 

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