Effective Safety Management: a Case Study in the Chemical Industry

Abstract

A major non-trivial problem within the area of industrial safety management today is to analyse, next to the safety impact of the technical equipment, the safety impact of a 'business process' as currently required by regulation and safety standards. This paper describes a case study of a pesticide company struggling with the question of how to improve the safety of their operational process further and at the same time also improve the reliability of their operational process. According to the literature 'control of the business process' is the keyword to improve the safety and reliability 'performance' of a company. A formal control model is proposed together with a classification system (using maturity levels) to analyse and qualify business processes with respect to their impact on process safety. This method has been applied in a case study where it resulted in a model of a business process. Using the model it was possible to classify the business process control system used and to identify related improvement opportunities. The proposed method showed that, in contrast to the company's perception, it was not the production department that was responsible for most of the problems but the peripheral processes relating to the production department. The interaction between departments caused not only potential safety problems, but also caused system reliability problems. For the company it was demonstrated that the interdependency of the (different activities in the-) operational process is an essential element preventing further improvement if not addressed properly.

Accidents in the chemical industry: are they foreseeable?

“…Bellamy, Leathley, and Gibson (1995). Sonnemans, Körvers, and Brombacher (2004) give a first idea on how to map organizations and their exception handling processes, to identify weaknesses with respect to the control of disruptions.…”