Using the Expert Knowledge of Operating and Maintenance Technicians to Drive Continuous Safety Improvement

Many chemical processing facilities have seemingly reached a “safety plateau” in which their safety performance, as measured by OSHA Total Recordable Rates, have remained fairly constant over a period of several years despite numerous attempts to drive improvements.  Process Improvement Institute staff have developed an approach, using simple, existing tools to make a step-change performance improvement in safety.  This paper outlines an approach to tap into the hidden resource in every plant: the vast, practical knowledge of the plant’s operating and maintenance technicians that any chemical processing facility can implement to develop more robust and sustainable safety improvements.  Nearly all safety improvement processes follow the same basic approach: identify the highest risk situations, develop and implement defenses against these risks, and verify the effectiveness of these defenses.  The approach outlined in this paper uses this same process, but integrates the knowledge of the technical staff with the often overlooked (and certainly under-utilized) knowledge of the people who actually operate and maintain our facilities. 

The first step of the process consists of confidential, structured brainstorming by technician teams to identify those aspects of their work that they judge to have the highest risks.  The outcome of these meetings is a short list of “high risk” tasks that are communicated to management and engineering.  The next step is a semi-quantitative risk assessment, which includes technicians, engineering and supervision to refine and prioritize this list.  The following step develops defenses against these risks, using what we call “Learning Teams”.  As the name implies, the focus of this effort is to fully learn about all aspects of the matters being reviewed before developing solutions.  While technician involvement is critical in each step of the improvement process, it is probably most critical here.  Combining technician knowledge with the theoretical knowledge of the technical staff provides a powerful mixture that results in a highly effective improvement team.  This simple approach has repeatedly proven highly effective in identifying practical, and significantly, technician-owned solutions. 

This process identifies many solutions, so the next step in the process is implementation.  Typically, many of the solutions can be completed fairly quickly and easily using area resources (including the technicians who helped identify them).  In other cases, more extensive design work will be required.  However, technicians need to be involved in these projects as well to ensure their success.  The final step of the process is the verification of solution effectiveness.  This can be accomplished by folding these efforts into existing routine management reviews such as those commonly held with a site’s ISO programs or routine project reviews.  This provides an opportunity for technician involvement to share the success of their work with site leadership, which in turn builds trust within the technician and management teams of the organization.