An Approach to Improve Process Safety Management Audits

The status of a process industry facility’s risk-based process safety management program implementation and performance depends on many interconnected factors. Among the many factors that influence the status of implementation and performance are: maturity of adopted process safety management system, facility size and age, severity of process hazards, organization’s safety culture, incidents history, risk tolerance, competency, and the regulatory requirements. The success of an organization’s safety program in achieving the organization’s own safety targets is typically measured utilizing a structured audit program. The used audit techniques may vary depending on the life cycle stage of the facility. Therefore, it is important to select the right audit technique that helps identify risk-based process safety gaps and establish basis for corrective actions.

Classical audit techniques have been focused on reviewing organization’s written process safety management policies and procedures for completeness, interviewing stakeholders for awareness and understanding, and checking process safety records for degree of implementation.

However, to improve the effectiveness of an audit exercise, the process safety management program is further evaluated via assessing the strength of the process preventive and mitigative barriers, which is provides a view of the process safety management system performance in action.

In this presentation, an approach to conduct hazard identification and risk assessment in conjunction with process safety audit is described using the bow-tie technique. This approach emphasizes on hazard identification and determining the preventive and mitigative barriers. The strength of these barriers helps to evaluate the process safety performance at the site.

Ultimately this approach, this will allow identifying the high risk hazard and determine the performance of barriers and to showcase the ultimate consequences. It’s pictorial representation of hazard, barriers, and consequences. PSM auditors use this tool to check the effectiveness of the barriers within the domain of organizations PSM element.