What Incidents Teach Us about Process Safety Knowledge Management

In order to manage our processes safely we must have, generate and share process safety information. The rules and guidance make that clear. However, information is not knowledge and there is no formal guidance for understanding how critical processinformation becomes knowledge and when, how and where that knowledge should be shared. This presentation will 1) briefly introduce process safety knowledge as distinct from process safety information, and 2) demonstrate the uses of process safety knowledge by examining a number of industry incidents and identifying the failures in providing critical knowlede to the people who needed it, when they needed it and in a manner that they could have used the knowledge to prevent or mitigate significant loss. The goal here is to present the audience with an understanding that process safety knowledge management is critical to safe operations.