(41aa) Effective Tools for Strengthening Contractor Safety Management – Contractor Project Safety Assurance Framework and Contractor Incubation Centers

It is a common practice to engage contractors at different levels across different stages of project lifecycle (Conceptual, Engineering, Procurement, Construction, Operation, Turnarounds and Decommissioning etc.). The analysis of incident databases shows that Contract workmen are mostly involved (either a cause of risk or risk receptor) in process safety events. For example, on observing the key performance indicators (KPI) (No. of fatalities, Fatal accident rate (FAR), Total recordable injury rate (TRIR), Lost time injury rate (LTIR)) used to benchmark safety performance by International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP Safety performance indicator -2021 data, dated June 2022), it is evident that the contribution by the Contractor category is high and Contractor related incidents are major concerns. Chola MS Risk Services has been providing services (Process Safety Management Gap Analysis, PSM Implementation, Incident Investigations) from last 27 years and noticed that the contractor management during Process Safety Management implement is hindered due to two main challenges.

The first challenge is involvement of different contractors and sub-contractors across project lifecycle leading to lack of holistic view in contractor risk management and to address it contractor project safety assurance framework has been developed for different stages of project. The framework lists out the workflow across all stages of project lifecycle (Conceptual, Engineering, Procurement, Construction, Operation, Turnarounds and Decommissioning etc.) for technical safety studies (E.g., Inherent design workshops, Hazard identification workshops etc.); review safety practices (E.g., tracking of risk reduction measures, application of lessons learnt) to be adopted; and safety philosophy documents (E.g., Interface documents, risk registers etc.) to be developed. The overall idea is to be provide specific reasonable guidelines for contractor safety management across all stages of project lifecycle. These guidelines can be refereed to when establishing the competency requirements and selecting the contract workmen.

The second challenge is the lack of desired skill of contractor workmen for field level activities and to address it Chola MS Risk Services has implemented the concept of Contractor Incubation Centers and has been running across different facilities for skill development of contract workmen. The objective is to improve overall safety culture among contract workmen by influencing behavior and skill development. The analysis would be around the parameters like violations, reasons for at-risk behavior, interventions etc. Over a period of time, these data have been the basis for strengthening contract safety at field level. Also, experiential learning modules are used for further understanding the behaviors. This approach has been proved more successful for organizations implementing PSM.

Overall, this paper focusses on sharing the details on the contractor project safety assurance framework and case studies on developing skill of contract workmen using Contractor Incubation Centers and experiential learning modules.