Safety Performance System

Implementing a safety performance system starts with defining the job-performance objectives for the position to be analyzed. This will require a thorough and accurate analysis of the job. The most common task analysis method for analyzing jobs requires a decomposition of job tasks into simpler subtasks, component tasks, or steps (Kaufman, Thiagarajan, and Sivasailam 1997, 189). The safety field is familiar with this process, as it is a common approach to conducting safety-related analyses such as job safety analyses or procedure analyses. Selection of the job tasks to analyze 

In addition to job tasks, the organizational processes must be evaluated and documented. 

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Written job description that contains reference to safety responsibilities and objectives > Job appraisal and performance review systems that measure and reward good safety performance > Systems that deal with failures and that identify a range of actions that can be taken to rectify the failures. (This is often achieved through the normal discipline arrangements of the organisation.)... 

To be able to systematically identify opportunities for reducing human error, it is useful to ask the question, What is human error One definition is that human error is an inappropriate or undesirable human decision or behavior that reduces, or has the potential for reducing safety or system performance (Rasmusssen 1979). There is a tendency to view errors as operator errors. However, the error may result from inadequate management, design, or maintenance of the system. This broader view which encompasses the whole system can help provide opportunities for instituting measures to reduce the likelihood of errors. 

CCPS G-55. Guidelines for Performance Measures for Continuous Improvement of Process Safety Management Systems. American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Center for Chemical Process Safety, New York. 

Another way of interpreting absolute risk estimates is through the use of benchmarks or goals. Consider a company that operates 50 chemical process facilities. It is determined (through other, purely qualitative means) that Plant A has exhibited acceptable safety performance over the years. A QRA is performed on Plant A, and the absolute estimates are established as calibration points, or benchmarks, for the rest of the firm s facilities. Over the years, QRAs are performed on other facilities to aid in making decisions about safety maintenance and improvement. As these studies are completed, the results are carefully scrutinized against the benchmark facility. The frequency/consequence estimates are not the only results compared—the lists of major risk contributors, the statistical risk importance of safety systems, and other types of QRA results are also compared. As more and more facility results are accumulated, resources are allocated to any plant areas that are out of line with respect to the benchmark facility. 

To make sure that all contractors and subcontractors maintain a minimum level of safety performance, the client, or general or main contractor, should establish standards for compliance. During the project planning stage, affected prime contractors should have an opportunity to provide input and resolve differences. Cross-cut committees are encouraged to allow prime contractors to standardize or normalize such essential elements as procedures, permit systems, and training. 

Where an effective informal system exists and is followed, the issue is one of style, not substance. A facility or unit may have a strong safety culture and sound safety practices, but its managers lack the habit of form documentation, or simply don t think it is important. Assuming that safety performance meets applicable standards, you will probably assign cases like these a relatively low priority, compared with other noncompliance situations. Cases like these are also often the easiest to fix since the fundamentals are already in place, what s required is simply to formalize the informal system by preparing and implementing documentation procedures. 

As with previous, similar exercises, encourage your team to be creative. Like any sound management system, your PSM system probably creates unexpected side benefits over and above those related spedfically to safety performance. For example, the pilot test may have demonstrated that a new system, once installed, enabled the facility to reduce unplanned downtime with better planning and use of preventive maintenance. Or perhaps the pilot test process itself may have helped improve relations between the facility and corporate staff. 

Accountability is the obligation to answer for one s performance with respect to expectations, goals, and objectives. It is an important element of an effective process safety management system. To improve safety, the risk associated with human errors must be reduced. The work situation is the predominant cause of human errors and management has control over the work situation. 

The failure data for these rates is obtained from maintenance work requests supplemented by incidence reports and Licensee Event Reports from the 1975-1980 time period. The work requests provide a complete history of all repairs performed at Oconee. They are not restricted to safety-related systems, they are written during all modes of unit operation, and they are not produced in response to licensing-based criteria. 

Additional materials and components that are normally included in a system satisfy safety needs, system performance indications, and common sense. Service switches should be placed within view of the fan to ensure that the system will not be activated while maintenance is in progress. Systems should be clearly marked as a radon reduction device to ensure that future owners of the building do not remove or destroy the system. An operation manual describing the system and its purpose should be made available. 

Moreover, several internal, external, and corporate audits showed and confirmed the positive picture indicating that the safety management system at the gas plant was performing above average. Nevertheless, despite Longford s excellent safety record on September 25th, 1998 the tragic accident occurred. 

In the previous Chapter it was shown that the developed protocol for analysis identified the ineffective control elements causing the precursors prior to accidents. However, due to the lack of detailed accident information the conclusions were limited. To perform the analysis, using the developed 7-stage protocol pro-actively (before any accident occurs), cases have to be selected on which the analysis can be performed and from which reliable and generic conclusions about safety indicators and the performance of current safety management systems can be obtained. The next sub-Section will discuss the selection criteria to select suitable cases. 

In safety-critical systems, it is possible to document refinements precisely enough to perform automatic consistency checks on them. However, achieving this level of precision is rarely cost-effective, and we do not deal with that topic in this book. 

SAE has established a Fuel Cells Standard Forum that is chartered with the establishment of standards and test procedures for fuel cell powered vehicles. The committee was established in 1999. The standards will cover the safety, performance, reliability and recyclability of fuel cell systems in vehicles with emphasis on efficiency and environmental impact. The standards will also establish test procedures for uniformity in test results for the vehicle/systems/components performance, and define interface requirements of the systems to the vehicle. Task Groups have been formed in the areas of safety, performance, reliability, emissions, recyclability, interface and miscellaneous. 

High safety performance. Inovyl has developed a robust instrument control and protective system to cater for all known process hazards. 

Also, the design practice includes P ID documentation, database specification and verification of purchased equipment, control design and performance analysis, software configuration, real-time simulation for DCS system checkout and operator training, reliability studies, interlock classification and risk assessment of safety instrumented systems (SIS), and hazard and operability (HAZOP) studies. 

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. 

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 need for metrics is particularly important in process safety, in no small measure because the hazards may not be readily evident. Unlike some other safety risks where dangerous situations are more apparent—such as unsafe scaffolding, unsecured cables, trenches, and other excavations—information on the status and safety of hazardous containment systems (e.g., internal corrosion, an improperly sized relief valve) is not generally visible. Without a constant and reliable flow of information on process safety performance and management systems, leaders may, in essence, be flying blind. 

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. 

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. 

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