(8b) Building a Group Process Safety Management System for a Non-Chemical Industry

The Umicore (Belgium international company with entities all over the world) organization describes in their vision statement of 2010 and 2015 that ‘a great place to work’ with 'a zero lost time accident goal' is the way to go.

Early 2014 this continuous improvement process for safety experienced a major setback due to a fatal accident (explosion) in one of the largest and most advanced sites (Olen Belgium. Seveso high risk site).
The technical and organizational investigation showed that the underlying causes that led to this accident could be found in the general approach for process safety. The focus for safety, till that moment for this non chemical industry, was occupational health and safety. The attention, the awareness and the improvement programs for process safety were not at the same level as for occupational safety.

As this deficiency was not only linked to the site where the accident happened, the corporate organization of the group decided to launch a worldwide effort to put more focus on process safety.

Based on the 'good practices' documented in CCPS literature, bench mark visits, own good practices within the group and experiences, a project team started to describe, build and enroll a process safety management system for the Umicore group.

This journey was based on the following principles and activities:

- building a process safety community
- awareness building on all levels (management, supervisors, operators)
- hazard and risk profiling of all sites
- internal assessments of all high risk sites
- description of internal standards and guidance notes
- introducing a general risk acceptance level for all sites
- describing the process risk reduction rules
- workshops and training programs for process safety
- development of Umicore PHA and PRA tools
- ensure that process safety is a topic in compliance audits and due diligence assessments

In this presentation I will focus on the approach, the steps, and the practical implementation with focus on simplicity and pragmatism.