Louisa Nara said she "gets jazzed" in a roomful of people who are committed to process safety management (PSM) and want to save lives.
"We want to protect ourselves, our co-workers, our environment, our children and our community," Nara, technical director of the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), said. "And I think we are able to meet that goal."
Addressing delegates at the 30th Annual Texas/Louisiana Environmental, Health & Safety Seminar held recently in Galveston, Texas, Nara observed tracking metrics is integral to companies that strive to better understand process safety incidents, which ultimately leads to improved performance.
Nara likens tracking safety metrics to an individual wearing a FitBit, the ubiquitous electronic device that tracks fitness activity.
"It gives you feedback right away," she said. "It is the same thing. We need to look at our clients and our processes and pipelines. We need to monitor the right things that tell us what the health of the systems are so that we can improve their health and make things better for all of us."
One of CCPS's most valuable tools is the data derived from its Process Safety Leading Indicators Industry Survey, a global survey of 43 of the organization's member companies.
"We decided to do a survey because one of the member companies came to us and said, 'You know, we'd like to know how everybody else is doing this so we can benchmark against it,'" Nara said. "The intent was to document leading and lagging indicators so that people can use those most applicable to their own situation and sites.
"We wanted to look at what's being used and what's been dropped, what is commonly used, what are the barriers, and what are the practices and the areas of improvement that we need."
Nara said the survey identified three different focus areas as the most effective in improving performance: PSM compliance, learning experiences and management of deviations, and management engagement.
Most of the surveyed companies said they could identify improvement in terms of compliance with OSHA and other requirements, and that they were actually learning from their experience and managing their deviations better.
Management engagement was significantly enhanced, Nara emphasized, noting demonstrable adherence to process safety yields rewards.
"If something is repeatable and defendable, you can take that to the leaders of the company -- the ones who have the purse strings," she said. "Senior management has to be committed and has to support the efforts. It is essential to the implementation and sustainability of a successful metrics program."
Why global metrics?
CCPS is a global operation that receives strong industry support from the American Petroleum Institute as well as Japan, Brazil, Europe, the United Kingdom "and a lot of large, multinational organizations," Nara said.
The organization's process safety metrics findings were released in January 2008 and updated in February 2011, with the intent the thresholds would evolve to a Globally Harmonized Standard-based definition.
"Why global metrics?" Nara asked. "The biggest thing is we want to be consistent, and we want to be able to compare one site to another. A majority of companies have manufacturing facilities in more than one region of the world. We want to be able to benchmark, and we want to be able to simplify the recordkeeping by eliminating multiple sets of data."
Adoption of common process safety metrics within the chemical and petrochemical sectors also provides for continual process safety improvement, as well as mitigation and elimination of risks, Nara said.
"And all of this information is downloadable free to you," she concluded.
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