3 basic process safety questions (2024)

1. Do you understand what can go wrong?

Answering this question requires you to really understand your risks. A risk is the probability of an occurrence that adversely affects the realization of the organization’s business objectives, or causes serious damage to the environment or leads to hurting people.

Do we know the most significant risks and are they assessed and aligned with the organization’s risk attitude? Whereby risk attitude is defined as “an organization’s approach to assess and eventually pursue, retain, take or turn away from risk” (ISO 31000).

Answering this question is the first step in designing your (safety/quality/operational excellence) management system.

2. Do you know what your systems are to prevent this from happening?

What preventative and corrective measures do you have in place to prevent incidents from happening? Who is responsible? Which barriers or controls are more critical than others? Are you prepared for a situation when you have lost control over a critical process?

This question is about the implementation of your barriers and controls. It is a combination of utilizing applicable compliance frameworks and assessing your process in a barrier based manner, using the bowtie methodology.

3. Do you have information to assure they are working effectively?

Are you monitoring and measuring how well your control measures are performing? Are you using all available data to understand the availability and effectiveness of your critical barriers and controls? How well are your verification activities, such as oversight, audits and inspections carried out? Have you analyzed your incidents and what is the status of your improvement actions?

This question is about the performance of your barriers and controls.

The software features making it possible

The features used for this solution:

• BowTieXP: visual risk assessment
• BowTieXP: audit surveys
  
• IncidentXP: incident assessment

Guest blog by Ian Travers

When it comes to the best practices for process safety, Ian warns of the danger of ‘not seeing the wood for the trees’. Accurately and comprehensively providing an overview of all risks associated with a process will paint, by necessity, a complicated picture. An effective process safety system aims to clarify the complications by focusing on the elements that really matter. These questions are designed to help with that.

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