Process Safety Management - What's Missing?
Authors: Murray Phil 
Published: August 2015

This paper will explore best practices for operators to make risk mitigation arising from process safety management (PSM) systems an integral part of efficient and effective operations.

Operational risk arises from a complicated set of interrelated parameters and is viewed and managed in differing ways depending on the role and level in the organisation. The challenge is to simplify this complexity enabling all levels of the organisation to collectively focus on the major elements of risk that are important.

Conceptual models like James T. Reason's Swiss Cheese barrier model or Bow-Tie models have been developed in an attempt to describe the inter-related nature of operational risk, but the industry has yet to develop operational systems that enable routine management of operational risk.

Regulators are requiring companies with hazardous installations to implement process safety management systems. This has led to functionally focused management and process safety systems primarily aimed at compliance.

Across the globe there are a number of process safety management models, from the Occupational Safety and Health Assocation (OHSA), California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OHSA), Safety and Environmental Management Systems (SEMS), UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the Energy Institute, and even the Tier 1-4 leading and lagging indicators from the American Petroleum Insititute (API). Furthermore, each company has established their individual process safety management or control systems to comply with or operationalise these models. Common to most systems is the concept of barriers, lines of defence, or layers of protection as a means of understanding how to protect operations from major accident hazards (MAHs).

The challenge every organisation faces is how to relate the performance of their process safety systems in a meaningful way to the operatonal reality of the plant. Too often process safety leading indicators end up being focused on programme health and do not provide a forward looking view of how all the operational risk comes together where it matters most; frontline operations.

To be successful in creating a sustainable business in hazardous industries, organisations need to collectively manage risk across their operations in a routine and efficient way. This requires a change in the dynamic between safety and productivity, where safety is not set against production and risk mitigation becomes an integral part of efficient and effective operations. Organisations need a holistic and common means of balancing risk against production at all levels of the operation.

This paper will review existing PSM models, the challenge in relating PSM performance to the operational reality of the plant and how a new breakthrough provides a simple, elegant means of relating the collective performance of a company's process safety systems to the real cumulative risk impact on plant operations at any given point in time.

This breakthrough is not a new process safety model nor an addition to existing process safety models. It provides the means to connect deviations from process safety performance standards to the operational reality of the plant through a common language of risk so that operational risk mitigation can become an integral way of achieving efficient and effective operations. By doing so it allows operators to understand their levels of MAH risk in a prominent and real time manner. MAH pathways through the fundamental barriers can be identified by combining the residual risk arising from deviations in any process safety systems. This provides a key indicator of MAH risk.

This new breakthrough will allow people at all levels in an organisation to better understand the cumulative operational risk they are carrying at any given time which can be used to improve operational decision making. The benefits it delivers range from serving as an early warning system for potential MAH related incidents (allowing organisations to make proactive interventions), better prioritisation of maintenance to more informed decision making around risk and activity at the daily operations level.