Engaging Senior Management in Process Safety

It is easy for senior managers to justify committing resources to occupational safety. The payback in reduced accidents is self evident.  However, since catastrophic process events are relatively rare, it is much more difficult to demonstrate a return on similar investments in process safety.  How do you show that such investments have truly made operations safer, especially when there is little or no history of serious process safety events in the recent past?  How do you get senior managers to understand that the risks are real and great enough to warrant making process safety management a key priority for the organization?

We have been struggling with these issues in Air Liquide USA for a number of years.  This paper describes a sequential process for building senior management commitment that has worked for us. The four stages of the process are: 

• Making process safety real and personal, not just an abstract concept
• Demonstrating how good process safety management can provide real returns today
• Helping senior managers to discover how their policies and decisions can significantly impact the safety of their operations
• Providing senior management with the information they need to judge the effectiveness of their process safety management systems and take appropriate action

Traditional PowerPoint style communications are good for transferring information but were not found to be an effective medium for engaging senior managers in process safety.  Videos and case studies proved to be much better media for immersing them in an event.  The paper will describe how these methods were used to draw senior managers into actual process safety events, helping them to realize that the consequences could easily have been much worse and that the events were not “Acts of God” but could have been prevented through more effective and rigorous process safety management. Guidance will be provided concerning how to create an effective video or case study and then deliver it in a way that achieves the results desired.

Good process safety management will improve plant reliability as well as safety.  The paper will show how the root and contributing causes of reliability events can typically be traced to ineffective implementation of the same management system elements that are required for safe operations.  The financial impact of improved reliability through the more disciplined approach to operations achieved by applying the elements of process safety management can then be readily demonstrated.

Finally, auditing is an element of every process safety management system but audit findings are often numerous and range from recommendations for improving a generally compliant work process to identifying serious non-compliances that need urgent attention. The paper will describe how the results of audits can be processed to identify systemic issues and significant risks needing senior management attention.