Why Fix Your Eyes on Process Safety Excellence?

Process safety incidents are mostly catastrophic as they are infrequent with serious consequences. Incidents often occur during transient periods such as plant startup and shut down, preparation of maintenance, during maintenance, and even operator shift handing and taking over periods. In order to prevent similar incidents from occurring, learning lessons from past incidents is an effective method of lowering the risk of future incidents from occurring again. However, people tend to have very short memory of past incidents which have occurred somewhere else, due to absence of direct impact to them.

There have been major incidents in the past which triggered plenty of investigation and research for corrective measures to prevent recurrence of such incidents. The lessons learnt from the investigations must be adopted by a committed management team, which is very crucial in building up a comprehensive process safety management system within any organization.

However, people have the misconception that once a management system is set up, it will work as intended despite the warning signs and red flags which may show up. Since process safety incidents are infrequent, the management may cite good personal safety performance as an indicator for their “good” process safety performance. They then overlook those warning signs such as near miss incidents. This behavior is nothing short of hazardous complacency.

Therefore, building up a workforce with a safety culture of learning lessons from past incidents, while maintaining organizational memory through adequate process safety capacity building is crucial. The leadership attitude which includes open two-way communication, top-down and bottom-up approach with mutual trust is important in driving their organization towards process safety excellence. Such a safety culture is realizable with the cohesive teamwork spirit of all members in an organization - management or otherwise - by fixing their eyes on process safety excellence.