Walk the Line: An Industry Model of Practice Sharing to Improve Process Safety in Industry

In 2010 the American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufactures formed the Advancing Process Safety initiative with an overall goal of reducing process safety incidents in industry. The model for improvement included data gathering and analysis from various sources including API RP 754 process safety metric collection, the development of an event sharing database, and observations from site assessments and regional network groups; all programs in Advancing Process Safety. The data indicated that a significant number of industry process safety incidents have causes related to operator line-up error and this led to the industry initiative Walk the Line. Walk the Line focuses on three areas of improvement: Changing culture, operational continuity with operational discipline, and operational readiness. The initiative has spread to numerous companies with hundreds of participants. This presentation will outline how Advancing Process Safety formed a guiding coalition of member companies to cooperate in practice sharing with the overall objective of reducing process safety incidents.