Safety and quality metrics for process hazard analysis

Industry over the last two to three years has put a lot of effort into implementing Process Safety Metrics. This is a good practice but, now that we have metrics data, how are we utilizing them to improve process safety performance? Air Products has been monitoring process safety performance for the last five years using combined Center for Chemical Process Safety and American Petroleum Institute RP 754 metrics. This article will highlight the approach we have applied, both through our lagging and leading indicators, to drive our process safety performance improvement programs. It will review the programs we initiated, leading indicators we identified, and how it also helped to improve our process safety culture. This article will also look at the importance of measuring severity and its impact in driving leadership behaviors. We will also discuss future opportunities to improve process safety performance via metrics analysis and follow‐up initiatives. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 33: 172–178, 2014

Industry incidents happened more frequently when various processes safety and Risk Management activities associated with various sub-processes are not followed, tracked and address on a timely basis. Having a robust tracking system of mitigations plan help to follow up to closure identified corrective actions and consequently this data can be of the valuable support for any incident investigation. Cabinda Gulf Oil Company Limited (CABGOC) has developed over the years several Process Safety (PS) metrics involving Management of Change (MOC) Process, Risk Management (RM) studies recommendations, Loss of Containment (LOC), Safety System Function Test, Control System Data, and open Non-Conformance Report (NCR) related to discrepant material conditions. This manuscript will describe how these metrics are put together, the process and how the teams involved are functioning around that. It also describes the process of closure and the functional authority of each metrics governance. The sufficient information on the data analysis, inference and the utilization of the historical trend for the continual improvement of the targets on the risk mitigation and RM planning are discussed. The key challenges of building the Organizational Capability (OC) to sustain the processes and Process Safety Information (PSI) validation for an effective RM studies will be highlighted in the article. These PS metrics created a multi-disciplinary teams working on different tasks and tracking the actions leading to work culture improvement. CABGOC Leadership Teams does field verification and validation through General Manager of Operations (GMO), audits, Facility Engineering (FE)/ Heath Environment Safety (HES) field audits, operations top 10 critical safeguard verification list to authenticate the importance of verification and action tracking. Some of the key risk reduction benefits of the PS metrics tracking and monitoring will be deliberated in the article. The article will provide key lesson learned for future industry practices. PS Metrics help to track, trend, and have dialog about our high risk areas.

7 - Process technology safety and hazard analysis

In 2006/2009, PETRONAS Carigali embarked on its Process Safety Programme; driven primarily by concerns over an increasing trend in process-related incident occurring throughout the Company. The programme, aimed at institutionalizing process safety and creating a process safety culture throughout the Company, focused on defining explicit process safety expectations, thereafter putting in place the required processes to intensify the implementation and mandatory compliance. To ensure comprehensive programme, eight (8) key process safety areas, spanning the entire value chain of technical and operational integrity, were identified; these are: ■Design Integrity;■Mechanical Integrity;■Management of Change;■Process Safety Information;■Process Hazard Analysis;■Pre-Activity Safety Review;■Operating Procedures; and■Proprietary and Licensed Technology Assessment. For each of the identified 8 process safety areas, explicit expectations were defined; and in ensuring sustained implementation, these expectations were integrated in an existing HSE Management System. Additionally, detail implementation processes were also defined in procedures and guidelines associated with the HSE Management System. Detail aspect of the programme and its implementation will be covered in the full paper. Some 3-4 years into the programme, tangible improvement can be felt across the organization, particularly in areas of compliance culture to process safety, and the ensuing improved process safety performance. The critical success factors for the effective implementation of the Process Safety Programme can be summarized as follows: ■Unequivocal demonstration of process safety leadership at all levels, including dedicated teams charged with process safety responsibilities;■Explicit process safety expectations integrated as part of the overall technical and operational integrity;■Clearly defined processes; i.e. apart from stipulation on WHO need to do WHAT, WHEN and WHY, guidelines on HOW these are to be done were also formalised;■Regular process safety audits, and effective tracking to closure, including oversight by senior management; and■Effectiveness of implementation and compliance regularly reviewed by facility management, business unit management and senior management; and effective in-house tracking mechanism developed for standardization of reporting.

Process safety consequence modeling using artificial neural networks for approximating heat exchanger overpressure severity

Risk assessment and risk reduction of an acrylonitrile production plant

Patient Safety and Quality Metrics in Pediatric Hospital Medicine

Beach Energy Limited (referred as Beach Energy or Beach) is an ASX-listed exploration and production company headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia. Founded in 1961, Beach produces oil and gas from five onshore and offshore basins across Australia and New Zealand. During its most recent growth phase, Beach added a number of assets to its portfolio that were originally developed and operated by companies with different management systems, standards and reporting requirements. Over the past 5 years Beach has been – and continues to be – on a journey of learning, developing and refining its systems and standards for reporting process safety performance and integrating these within a ‘one Beach’ philosophy. This paper describes the current stage of this evolution in measuring, reporting and managing process safety performance at Beach, presents some of the key learnings to date, in addition to outlining the next steps Beach is taking on this journey. The paper covers the following: (1) experience with IOGP RP 456 Tier KPI model and current main KPIs in use; (2) application to projects, drilling campaigns and operating assets; (3) challenges in gathering data and event classification; (4) importance of getting safety critical equipment selection right; (5) communicating large and complex KPIs to a varied audience; (6) learning and improving process safety performance and systems based on KPIs; (7) new approaches to reporting health of process safety barriers aligned to IOGP RP544 categories using simplified bowtie Major Accident Event dashboards; and (8) integration of process safety management within the Beach Operations Excellence Management System. The key conclusions are that measuring process safety performance requires dedicated effort and consensus across all stakeholders on the most appropriate way to measure performance. Reporting needs a positive and collaborative culture to have the right impact. Managing performance must be based on objective evidence and careful analysis of the data. Achieving effective and efficient process safety measurement, reporting and management is a multi-year journey of continual improvement.

While no industrial chemical incident has had the magnitude for loss of life that occurred in 1984 at Bhopal, process safety incidents continue to occur today often resulting in serious injuries, fatalities, environmental harm, property damage, and business interruption. Over the last three decades, we have learned that these three interrelated foundations are essential for effective process safety programs: (1) process safety culture and leadership, (2) operational discipline, and (3) process safety systems. If any one of these foundations is weak, process safety incidents will occur and the organization's process safety performance will be poor. This article explores how the process safety systems are essential barriers when reducing risks, applying the layer of protection model and the bow tie barrier analysis model into a novel visual tool that can be used to identify both the foundational gaps and the process safety systems which failed. Although the Bhopal incident is used as the case study, the objective of this article is to provide a tool for others to use when summarizing their investigations in a way that helps them visually depict the investigation's findings and helps them prioritize and address weaknesses in one or more of their process safety program foundations. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 34: 345–354, 2015

Metrics addressing process safety incident performance typically focus on frequency and severity statistics. Often, these lagging metrics are not overly sensitive to actual performance, making trending and forecasting difficult. This article presents the results from a statistical study of a large incident dataset where changes in the Pareto shape parameter were observed as a function of time. This approach has been found to give far better insight into process safety performance than traditional incident metrics and readily relates back to concepts such as the “incident triangle” and “layers of protection.” Through the application of this approach, trends within process safety incident performance have been observed earlier, and more accurate forecasting has allowed for the identification of anomalies. In turn, these critical observations have allowed for the better structuring and targeting of process safety programs. Although incident data are generally considered as a lagging indicator, this approach has clearly reduced the lag time associated with this type of data and has given valuable insight into the current status of process safety performance. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2009

Safety culture has been identified as a critical element in high consequence incidents in the oil and gas industry over the past few decades. Traditionally, safety culture, which is the collection of beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the stakeholders within an organization regarding safety, has been viewed in terms of occupational safety: i.e., perception of components and norms that affect personal safety. It is clear that lapses in occupational safety can lead to injuries or fatalities to individual workers. However, lapses in process safety can cause injuries or fatalities to groups of workers or the public, or extensive damage to the facility and environment. The visible nature of hazards to individual workers often leads companies to focus more on occupational safety culture as opposed to process safety culture since occupational safety performance is easier to recognize. Process safety hazards are related to the process, conditions which are not necessarily obvious but are hidden within the complex systems comprising the chemical, mechanical, and controls of the process unit. Thus, process safety requires engineering discipline to systematically identify and manage the potential hazards posed by a process system throughout its life. Process safety culture is the collective group of values (i.e., beliefs, perceptions, attitudes) and behaviors that affect the safety management of processes in an organization. In the traditional safety culture assessment approach, the focus is on individual behavior, attitudes, and perception of process safety concerns such as management of change, process hazard analyses, near-miss reporting, etc. has been missing. Due to such gaps, the application of traditional safety culture assessment tools and methods in the process industry does not provide a comprehensive status of the state of process safety culture in such organizations. The objective of this paper is to discuss the differences between the occupational safety culture and process safety culture assessment techniques and present methods and guidelines to develop a process safety culture assessment tool.

Process safety events (or near misses and incidents) are key indicators of a company's process safety performance. The goal in reporting and evaluating near misses is to improve operators’ hazards awareness by recognizing unsafe conditions and acting on less‐severe Tier 3 near miss events before they escalate into more severe Tier 1 and Tier 2 type process safety incidents. Near miss analysis can also be used to identify themes and trends that a company should focus on to improve process safety risk management at their facilities. Air Products and Chemicals has been reviewing process safety near miss events for many decades but has developed and fine‐tuned a detailed and systematic near miss program within the last five years. The current program is modeled after American Petroleum Institute and Center for Chemical Process Safety guidelines with specific provisions for unique hazardous materials that Air Products handles. This article describes the global management program that must deal with the challenges of approximately 1,500 plus process safety near miss entries per year; worldwide operations in more than 40 countries; many different business units; and very diverse hazardous materials, systems, and services provided globally. The breadth of the near miss program, from technician to executive, and the depth of the program, from initial design to plant decommissioning, are presented. Near miss program learning and improvements are described that have enabled Air Products to efficiently analyze near misses, identify improvements in our process safety management program, as well as functional work processes, and effectively communicate global leadership improvement messages addressing near miss themes and trends to help support our Process Safety performance continuous improvement goals.

To examine whether telemedicine remains safe and of high quality despite rapid expansion of services by comparing telemedicine encounters before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pre-post study investigating 2,999 telemedicine encounters: February 1, 2020-May 15, 2020, was performed. A total of 2,919 completed visits before and after strict social distancing implementation were analyzed for patient and provider characteristics, encounter characteristics (e.g., history and physical examination), and quality and safety metrics (phone calls ≤ 7 days postvisit, visit-cause-specific hospital admission or mortality ≤ 30 days after visit). Stratified analysis of 3 groups for outcomes (young age, neuromuscular diagnosis, and new encounters) was performed. Patients ranging from 1 month to 33 years of age were seen. Rural patients were less likely to be seen during the pandemic compared with urban patients (8% vs 90%; p < 0.0001); teaching clinic and specialty clinic encounters increased significantly during the pandemic (8% vs 3%; p = 0.005), and documentation of at least 2 systems on examination was noted significantly more frequently during the pandemic (13% vs 7%; p = 0.009). No deaths were reported. There were no differences before/during the pandemic in safety or telemedicine failure metrics within the entire group and high-risk subgroups. Despite a markedly and rapidly expanded scope of ambulatory telemedicine care during the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine remained a safe and high-quality option for pediatric neurology patients. In addition, populations perceived as high risk for telemedicine (the very young, new patients, and those with neuromuscular diagnoses) can benefit from telemedicine visits, particularly when access to in-person care is limited.

Industrial processes contain inherent risks and to assess such risks the use of Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) are commonly applied. The benefits of first principles qualitative and quantitative models and empirical knowledge support for PHA are explored. The use of qualitative hazard analysis based on functional modelling to guide hazard analysis is emphasized. The study proposes a framework for investigating potential hazard scenarios based on functional modeling, e.g. Multilevel Flow Modeling of process system. Subsequently quantitative hazard analysis is used to prioritize the hazard scenarios with highest potential. MFM represents the process on several levels of abstraction and supports logical inference. The potential hazard scenarios are ranked by likelihood and severity. Judgment about likelihood, severity and the tolerability of the resulting risk is made on a subjective basis using the empirical knowledge of the PHA team members. The potential hazard scenario generation procedure can be computer-aided. The proposed framework is applied for a water injection system to increase oil recovery from existing reservoir with better safety performance. Qualitative functional models are efficient for detailed description of possible accident scenarios. Domino effects can be visualized in an MFM model. The possible major accident scenarios are selected by likelihood and severity of their effects. The major accident scenarios can be examined in detail through further quantitative analysis. The hazard analysis of a water injection system demonstrates the feasibility and applicability of the proposed framework. In industrial practice, formulation of the major accident scenario is usually based on historical incidents and the outcome of HAZOP/HAZID type hazard identification studies. Such studies are dependent on the team and their collective knowledge rather than being systematic and objective in nature. The proposed framework performs systematic and comprehensive plant failure and consequence path generation by a computer-aided tool.

This article presents a brief analysis of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Petroleum Refinery Process Safety Management National Emphasis Program (NEP) citation results as of early 2009. It includes trends distilled from the OSHA inspections performed to date. Recommendations for preparing for PSM NEP level inspections are provided.A proven approach to designing and implementing an upgrade project for OSHA process safety management systems and EPA risk management program is described. The model presented can be targeted to a facility's NEP specific citations or used for a general PSM system effectiveness upgrade.This article includes recommendations for improving PSM as a result of an NEP inspection. The recommendations are for the PSM elements that routinely have major OSHA citations; that is: Operating Procedures, Mechanical Integrity, Process Hazards Analysis, Process Safety Information, Management of Change, and Incident Investigations. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2009