(71ak) The Requirements and Tools to Treat Safety Process Risk Caused By Organizational Changes

1. INTRODUCTION

The economy wants physical changes in the technologies to attend economic challenges of quality, quantity and cost reduction. The nature wants equilibrium in production keeping the perceived image of Company in the market and society. Then the government tries with operation licenses keep order inside house, the earth planet.

In economic relationship may be appear an urgent need to change capacity of the plant, type of product, parameters of process, or processing speed. In this situation, the installation of new equipment with new controls can take by surprise the production team - is important to know which level of knowledge will be needed to do some changes in the  operation of new equipment.

The functional changes can trigger events that can cause accidents, especially when there is substitution of key persons or groups that could stop the accident process. The lack of appropriate decision-makers and experts, with the dynamism and knowledge required, creating gaps in functions inside the company. On the other hand, the analysis of long-term or short-term to decisions depends of absent job staff. The speed is not appropriate for the integration between maintenance and operation in the industry.

2. ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES AND TECHNOLOGY

The organizational model found in the chemical and petrochemical companies, globally, continues to allow industrial accidents are characterized, as normal, for operational continuity. Analyzing organizational structure is easy to verify that there are no technical prerequisites for the formulation of management, and so, is configured that is not checked the level of concern that managerial change may have in the safety culture of the organization.

The organizational change has a higher weight than changes in the technological impact on process safety. The organizational changes alter the balance of the work and business which, according to most authors of reliability and safety, is the area of the root cause of the biggest events (accidents).

The organizational changes that can lead to greater fragility in process safety in industrial changes are: working conditions, personnel organization, functional allocation of people at work, organizational hierarchy, and, changes in the policies.

It is also known that, these organizational changes affect the changes in technology when affecting skills in the areas of design, operation, safety, and maintenance. It is important to analyze the motivations that lead to failure resulting from organizational aspects to define the appropriate manager profile.

According to CCPS, among the aspects of organizational changes, there are:

(a) working conditions: location, communication, time allocation by the people, and the activities of staff and turn during inversions, conditions of employment, emergency changes, and events involving the organizational climate; (b) In the organization of personnel, from cut of staff, change of job profiles, even in production management or safety; (c) Functional allocation of people at work where they discuss aspects such as size, level of expertise, integration, time and, manner of allocation, responsibilities, activities temporary, lack of work and, activities neglected; (d) In the organizational hierarchy where aspects such as centralization or decentralization of job roles, reorganization, control range, type of organization, change in service providers; (e) Changes in corporate policies and procedures in process safety.

3. LEADERSHIP FOR PREVENTION AND CONTROL OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE EVENT

It is essential that analyze the loss arising from organizational change to define what are the main characteristics desired in leadership who will plan, deploy, and monitor these organizational changes. The leaders must: (i) maintain the balanced decision between intuition and cognition profiles, (ii) to techniques for measuring and controlling human behavior and group in a time of crisis, (iii) know how to develop the perception of risk, commitment, behavior change, common sense, and, balance in the political decisions, (iv) develop people who: have clarity and understanding of complexity, know to analyze social risk, which knnow how identify human typologies, and what are the cultural tendencies to assign blame, (v) managers and supervisors must know impacts and know how to act when dealing with: questioning staff; organizational goals; stance centering routine; avoid turnover, cooperation in teams; informal leadership to neutralize the disharmony , delegation of activities.

4. HUMAN RELIABILITY ELEMENTS IN THE DECISION MAKING

The knowledge of human reliability is still subjective and develops only those with a prior concern and study on the subject. In this case there is no way to compare how much a top manager will consider the impact their decisions in the order of human reliability and their ability to pay attention to unwanted results in management actions.

When analyzing petrochemical processes, the serious impacts in the decision maiking, and, its consequences, do not allow, yet, knowledge about human reliability, then it is still present as subjective. Understanding human reliability is much more than having technical knowledge expected of man in task execution behaviors, but the practical application of their knowledge in the search for blockages of the factors that enhance human error. In this sense control tools for making the decision to allow practical application of human reliability and compulsory analysis of how much each action requested in change management, can promote security weaknesses in a process industry.

Understanding the disastrous impacts of taking a wrong decision on a chemical and petrochemical industry result in critical damage to internal and external communities, the environment, not only representing economic losses but damage to life, often irreversible, requires that the decision criticism should not be released to a person who has the title of manager or leader of a large organization. It is necessary that the most impactful decisions are shared and discussed, together with control tools and support decision making. For this we recommend the creation of a Risk Management Committee to share and expand the vision of the consequences of decisions in an organization. The production managers need objective tools for blocking or reformulation of strategic concerns of managers.

5. MANAGEMENT OF ORGANIZATION CHANGE, RISK AND TOOLS

The formation of the Risk Management Committee in an organization is important step to ensure the effective implementation of its tools of control. A survey would be applied in a company to validate the aspects considered to leaders and organizational environment.

The representativeness of the committee is presented by an expert in human reliability and risk management. The structure is open and enhanced by hierarchical independence of the plaintiff management unit. Its members would be multidisciplinary and rotary, and may be invited from other units or specialists from academia to analyze more complex decisions.

This structure would be discussed thoroughly the consequences and the minimal protections to ensure control of the process. The fact that a decision to be taken great impact to the committee, already requires greater attention and analysis by leadership, coupled with the tools to take the proposal to bring signatures committee of management. This requests a safer decision.

For decision making is offered a check-list to attend the analysis of change encompassing the following aspects: organization policy; operational team; management staff; managerial change practices; company management fusing; hierarchy changes; decision level and power; process tech; monitoring of processes and activities; positions of responsibility; management models; maintenance plans; plan of emergency response; operating costs; and change of critical procedures.

Questions in this checklist are performed to analyze and ratings with level impacts in the subject matter. If you have the highest value assigned, the manager must register the control actions taken to mitigate the effects, signed at the end and submitting to the risk management committee of the organization.

The questions involve the following topics: history operational occurrences; ability to lead; recognition by led; experience in operation of similar systems; knowledge and testing technology; domino technique for operating; operational Communication; Time for Decision; Adequate policy to culture; Ambience in team; Resistance to change by staff; Confidence in performing the task;  Approval of design changes; Expansion of the impacts in case of accidents; Adequacy of training;  Authorization to execute critical tasks; and Sequence the emergency response plan.

After the completed checklist will be discussed in committee, where it will leave approval with reservations, guidance for redirects, full approval or request for better discussion. This process can enlarge the time for change, but it is important to remember that the biggest investment is in safe operations and this should be the maximum value of an organization.