Safety Management System Audit Process

Investigating Chemical Process Incidents Auditing Process Safety Management Systems Making Acute Risk Decisions... 

Guidelinesfor Technical Management of Chemical Process Safety Center for Chemical Process Safety, New York, 1989 Guidelines for Auditing Process Safety Management Systems Center for Chemical Process Safety, New York, 1993. 

Introduction Review and audit processes are used in the chemical process industry to evaluate, examine, and verify the design of process equipment, operating procedures, and management systems. These processes assure compliance with company standards and guidelines as well as government regulations. Reviews and audits can encompass the areas of process and personnel safety, environmental and industrial hygiene protection, quality assurance, maintenance procedures, and so on. 

The key steps in the audit process are outlined according to preaudit ac tivities, audit activities, and postaudit activities in Fig. 26-12. These activities are described in detail in Guidelines for Auditing Process Safety Management Systems (CCSP, 1993) and will be only briefly discussed in this sec tion. 

The next process step evaluates the process safety management systems to determine if they are adequate to achieve the desired results, and if they are used as intended. This evaluation is highly subjective on the auditors part. This step sets the stage for the rest of the audit, guiding the auditor s information gathering and focusing attention on critical areas. 

The general purpose of an audit may be to determine if the toller has management systems and documented procedures in place to ensure process safety, environmental responsibility, product quality and traceability of materials. The need to audit could be to evaluate compliance with regulations or accordance with client requirements related to specific performance elements. A subjective rating system for ranking management systems audit results is often used. An example of one that might be appropriate is shown below ... 

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. 

Gathering audit data can be accomplished through observations, documents, and interviews. The data obtained is used to verify and validate that the process safety management systems are implemented and functioning as designed. Data gathering can be aided oy the use of audit samples, where a representative number of items are audited to draw a conclusion, and by using self-evaluation questionnaires. 

Collecting the correct information to monitor and understand performance of the process safety management system, and its separate elements, can provide an unbiased and comprehensive view of system performance. This will alert the appropriate personnel to weaknesses in the process safety system. A companywide versus a site-specific approach to process safety auditing, evaluation, and improvement not only deals with better prioritization of identified improvement work but potentially provides better auditing and evaluation against those conditions that one site may accept as normal/acceptable over time. 

Process safety audits are completed to understand how well the process safety management system is working. Process... 

---