(47j) Application of Leading and Lagging Indicators to Improve Laboratory Operation Safety

Unlike the chemical manufacturing process with fully automatic equipment, the laboratory operation in the chemical industry will still involve multiple types of manual handling for chemical analysis, reliability test, material characterization and failure analysis. The test operators or lab engineers have different levels of exposure to a lot of chemicals and physical hazards in multiple phases. In order to improve the operation safety and mitigate the potential risk, the study of situation awareness in the laboratory operation aims to investigate the perception of what is happening around the operation environment for both the normal situation and the abnormal situation, which has become an important part in the PSM(Process Safety Management). One of the effective methods to improve individual and team situation awareness and their individual responsibilities to accomplish the team’s goals and objectives is the application of  leading and lagging indicators, which have been recognized as the effective tools to drive process safety performance improvement. The processes and decisions to develop and implement the process safety leading and lagging indicators within the company involves the integration of the applied criteria, the differences between facility-level implementation and company-wide implementation, the potentially encountered barriers to success and the methodology to overcome, and the demonstrated benefits through the use of leading indicators. This paper will describe the straightforward application of leading and lagging indicators to identify the hazards and assess the risks of  laboratory operations. The analysis will be deployed in the ways of  manpower, machine, materials, method and environment. The analysis output can be regarded as the aid to safer laboratory design, operator training and real-time fault diagnosis.  This will help to debottleneck and achieve operation safety and occupational health in the semiconductor industry.