Industry Best Practices and Experience With Process Safety Leading Indicators

CCPS has been a leader in the development and deployment of process safety metrics since the mid-1990's.  Several international groups in the process industries have developed guidance on how to develop/deploy metrics and numerous examples of leading indicators have been proposed.  Many companies have adopted process safety metrics and are beginning to generate implementation lessons. Nonetheless, numerous major accident investigations have listed inadequate line-of-sight on effective process safety metrics as causal factors.   This paper will cover the following issues:

• Brief history on process safety metrics development
• Comparison of globally effective approaches for metrics deployment
• Benchmarking of company process safety metrics
• Discussion of indicator action limits
• Lessons learned

The presentation will compares the effective practices of several companies.  It will contrast the benefit and limitations of lagging/leading indicator strategies.  The paper will give some specific examples of where monitoring of specific process safety leading indicators have been credited with preventing/reducing the seriousness of process safety incidents.