Essential Practices for Developing, Strengthening and Implementing Process Safety Culture

Process safety management (PSM) has been focused primarily on technical and management systems that must be implemented that are essential to managing the risks of catastrophic releases of highly hazardous chemicals. Devoid so far has been a clearly defined process for focusing on the underlying PSM culture necessary to facilitate the management system to be effective. CCPS recognized this and formed a committee to understand the issues and recommend an approach. This culminated in 2014 in the start of a new CCPS guideline project “Essential Practices for Developing, Strengthening and Implementing Process Safety Culture – Project # 249”. This paper will explain the development of the guideline and the key findings of the research behind the recommended practice.

A significant amount of literature addresses working culture in industry, however, little literature exists which is solely dedicated to the process safety culture in the processing and allied industries. This book itemizes “essential practices,” to assess and strengthen process safety culture, but it is not expected to provide the comprehensive guidance for defining detailed management systems, as is often provided in a CCPS “guidelines” book.  The reader will benefit from reliable information, examples and cases studies, and references to literature, codes, and standards.

AcuTech mapped key PSM culture references and developed a new CCPS model for essential elements of a PSM culture initiative. These included the prior publications of the CCPS Core PSM Culture Principles based on the Columbia Space Shuttle Investigation (Kadri/Jones), the  PSM culture goals of the CCPS Vision CCPS 2020 statement (CCPS Vision 2020), and the 12 key principles from the Culture Chapter of the RBPS Book (Chapter 3, 2007). These formed the basis of a holistic model including the most important factor of a principle addressing Leadership and Process Safety as a Core Value.

The guidelines include:

• Practical advice on how to recognize, assess, strengthen and sustain a good process safety culture.
• References and case studies.
• Consolidated advice based on a wide range of industry experience.
• The long term benefits of sustaining a good process safety culture for an organization.
• The book itemizes “essential practices,” that describe the process safety culture life cycle from the beginning of cultural awareness, effective tools and techniques to assess process safety culture, as well as improving and sustaining a good process safety culture.