Safety Management Systems and Advanced Root Cause Analysis in Latin America

Safety Management Systems, including Process Safety Management, are a fairly recent introduction to our efforts to improve the Environment, Health and Safety. Safety Management Systems were developed based on the concepts of systematic improvement used in Total Quality Management, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and Dr. Deming teachings. As these more scientific systems were being implemented in the early nineties, some companies set goals to reduce the number of accidents by 90% in ten years. To accomplish these accident reduction goals, these companies new they had to improve their accident and incident investigation processes to reduce the number of repeat accidents. Therefore, many adopted advanced root cause analysis techniques as part of their Safety Management Systems.

This talk will provide an overview of Safety Management Systems and how they are used to improve Environment, Health and Safety performance in Latin America. It will also provide an overview of how advanced root cause analysis systems work and fit into a Safety Management System. Finally, the presentation will review several serious Latin American accident case studies to demonstrate how advanced root cause analysis was applied to analyze the accidents.

Speaker's Background

The author has a long history working to improve Health, Safety, and the Environment in Latin America. His experience includes work as the EH&S Director for Otis Elevator across Latin America where he performed serious accident investigations using advanced root cause analysis and participated as a committee member in the company's Management System World Committee.