Streamlining Systems and Establishing a Process Safety Culture With Current Day Technology

This paper outlines one organization’s efforts on enhancement of their process safety management systems. In this case study the original process safety systems were established to support and drive risk management and compliance in response to American Chemical Council’s Responsible Care initiatives preceding U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) process safety management (PSM) and Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Risk Management Plan (RMP). The facility had migrated away from some of the original baseline expectations and had not kept current with the performance based expectations of others in industry (relative to managing their process safety management systems). Each individual process safety management system, such as pre-start up safety reviews, management of change, employee participation, incident investigations and others were at different modes of maturity. The facility decided they were overdue for system upgrades. They had a definite need to find a system to centralize all elements of process safety with a more robust system utilizing current day technology.

Many organizations are interested in enhancing their process safety culture. Often this includes upgrading existing information management systems to utilize current day technology. Another upgrade interest may include identifying tools to streamline compliance. One main goal for all organizations is to ensure resources are being utilized in an effective, yet efficient manner. A key qualification when providing IT (information technology) solutions is to ensure any process safety system is robust enough to handle a high volume of information. The system shall be accessible and usable by multiple users. Consideration should also be given to the disparity in knowledge at many organizations on understanding functionality of a computer and the associated software solutions.