Top Performance On Process Safety

TOP PERFORMANCE ON PROCESS SAFETY.

Antonio Carlos de Oliveira Ribeiro¹, Armando Norberto Hornus², Hector David Torres Motta³

¹  Bayer CropScience- antonio.ribeiro@bayer.com. ² Bayer CropScience-, ³ Bayer CropScience-  

In order to have a homogeneous process safety culture in all productions installations around the world in its installations the Bayer Holding AG developed an initiative to involve all its workers. Top Performance on Process Safety (TOPPS) is the name of this initiative. TOPPS initiative was created also to give Bayer business the sustainability desired by its stakeholders and could be presented to others chemical companies.

This initiative is s a sequence of the first formal process safety structures and programs created by the company in compliance to the Europe community legislations so called ´Directive Seveso ´[1].  Since 1985 in Bayer organization efforts to maintain a Process and Plant Safety (PPS) culture have being done and many PPS programs were established.  After incorporation of new business and other companies’ internal audits in productions installations done in 2008 pointed room for improvements in PPS culture. It was identified in the following areas: Management Commitment, Organizational Structure and Community Management.  Despite others actions, PPS job requirements was defined and a systematic training was built.  PPS-TOPPS training initiative covers 26.000 manufacturing employees during 2012.  The training was divided in levels to cover PPS requirements from site managers to operators.  The original training material was in English language and translated to 17 different languages, since the idea was to cover all workers worldwide.  Basic 09 modules were established: Basic Overview, Rules and Regulations, Process Hazard Analysis, Explosion Protection, Thermal Hazards, Safety Installations, Safety Relevant Utilities and Consequence Analysis. According to the level of the worker each module had a number of hour’s duration. More than training the program permits education on PPS

The intention of this paper is to share the structure used, the results, and the program done by Bayer on this training initiative.  Other intention is also to show the author’s personal experience on this effort to cover the TOPPS training initiative in Latin America productions installations with a total of 812 employees covered.

[1] Directive 2012/18/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 July 2012, on the control of major-accident hazards involving dangerous substances, amending and subsequently repealing Council Directive 96/82/EC.