How are We Doing? Project 247 - Merging PSM Metrics and Management Systems

An approach to help a company reduce duplication of its management efforts as it improves its process safety performance is described in the CCPS book “Guidelines for Integrating Management Systems and Metrics to Improve Process Safety," scheduled to be published in 2014.  This paper provides an overview for the book, describing how a company can identify and prioritize its process safety-related risks across its separate groups, helping ensure that decisions made at any level in the company, whether corporate, regional or local, do not increase its overall risk.  Due to the inherent differences between their hazards, associated consequences and subsequent risks, the different process safety, occupational safety and health, environmental, quality and security groups differ and sometimes conflict over their group-specific risk reduction efforts (these are the “SHEQ&S” management groups).   In addition, the company’s legal, financial and human resources groups work to help their company survive internal and external pressures by keeping their group-specific risks as low as possible.   

The Guidelines book addresses the complex risk reduction efforts and interactions between these groups, focusing on process safety-related metrics that cross the different SHEQ&S group boundaries.  This book combines the Plan, Do, Check, Act management life cycle approach, the Bow Tie barrier analysis risk reduction approach, the Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS) concepts and applies recent advances for identifying and implementing process safety-related metrics.  Guidance includes methods for securing leadership support at all levels, identifying the common process safety-related metrics across groups, monitoring and identifying gaps in the process safety systems using these metrics, and then successfully implementing changes to the process safety systems.  The bottom line:  A company can improve its overall process safety performance using process safety-related metrics in an integrated SHEQ&S management system.