Total Safety and the Productivity Challenge

Maria Chiara Leva, Tom Kontogiannis, Marko Gerbec, Olga Aneziris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351609067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Adopting a strategic approach to risk management can maximize competitiveness and profitability. Total Safety and Productivity approaches offer managers a set of methods and tools to apply a Total Safety Management (TSM) philosophy to achieve this. The capability to anticipate, assess and plan for risks associated with future operations is a critical success factor, for enterprises of all types and sizes. The ability to risk assess actual operations with an easy to apply, resilient methodology can offer significant benefits in terms of the capacity to improve safety and performance.

This book describes approaches that can be used alone or jointly to improve safety management in any organization. The methods are based on academic best practice and have been developed by leading experts, but are presented here in a practical way for application in industry by non-experts. The book outlines a professional approach to risk and safety management, which requires goal setting, planning and the measurement of performance, and encourages a safety management system that is woven holistically into the fabric of an organization so that it becomes part of the culture, the way people do their jobs, and helps ensure that issues are correctly prioritized and managed as they emerge.

This book is essential reading for professionals, at both expert and non-expert level, who are interested in applying the TSM philosophy within their organization.

Part 1
A framework of managing total safety

1
Total Safety Management

Why?

Tom Kontogiannis

The evolution of safe systems of work in major hazards industries

The increasing complexity of technological systems has brought about a shift in the way that safety management has been perceived in the last 40 years. In the early 1970s, worker safety at industrial plants was generally managed through an adherence to prescriptive regulation and legislation as set out by governmental inspectorates. This so-called boots, belts and buckles approach to safety management suggested that as long as organizations followed regulations with respect to the protection of the workforce, the health and safety of workers was being managed effectively. While this approach seemed sufficient at the time, a number of catastrophic accidents resulting from the complexity of the industry shifted the responsibility for health and safety from government bodies to the particular organizations and industries.

An organization’s own responsibility for safety management (beyond adherence to regulatory requirements) was perhaps first proposed by the Health and Safety at Work Act in the UK (Hale & Hovden 1998). This Act set out a philosophy of ‘self-regulation’ where safety was seen as the primary responsibility of industry to ensure that all reasonably practical steps have been taken to improve health and safety. Although the terminology of ‘self-regulation’ remains problematic, this act was innovative in the sense that it focused on organizations taking responsibility for their own management of their unique risk profiles.

This shift in safety management was driven by a series of catastrophic events in a diverse set of industrial domains. For instance, the Seveso disaster (1976) gave rise to the Seveso II directive which mandated systematic management systems across facilities in Europe that handled dangerous substances. A decade later, the Piper Alpha accident provided a context for putting in place similar directives for offshore oil and gas facilities as a result of the Cullen inquiry. In this way, responsibility for health and safety became the primary concern of organizations, with regulatory bodies becoming the evaluators of organizational efforts in safety. Only when the primary mechanism for safety management moved from prescriptive regulation to organizational responsibility were specific safety practices grouped together, under the banner of Safety Management Systems (SMS). In this sense, modern SMS could be defined as collections of best practices and strategies by which organizations demonstrate that they are taking all reasonably practical steps to ensure the safety and welfare of their employees.

In the 1990s, we have witnessed an increase of national standards trying to support industries in their efforts to control and improve health and safety performance. An example of a widely used system has been the Successful Health and Safety Management System (HSG65) which was first prepared by the Health and Safety Executive (UK) as a practical guide for directors, managers, health and safety professionals and employee representatives who wanted to improve health and safety in their organizations. Because many national efforts remained largely uncoordinated, an international collaboration called the Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) Project Group was formed to create a unified approach. Drawing on the best of existing standards and schemes, the OHSAS Project Group published the OHSAS-18000 Series and received wide recognition in the industry.

In fact, many national standards and the OHSAS-18000 series mirrored several components of the ISO 9001 series pertaining to quality management systems and the ISO 14001 series pertaining to environmental management systems. Indeed, for some time organizations have sought an integration of their management systems in order to increase efficiency and avoid duplication of processes across the organization.

Although, several ‘safety programs’ have been advocated in the period 1990–2000 that looked into separate aspects of safety management (e.g., safe work practices, mechanical integrity, hazards identification, incident analysis) the modern Safety Management Systems that emerged in the 21st century provided a more comprehensive framework that puts together all these safety programs. The SMS provided industrial organizations with a system that facilitated the transfer of information between different programs, defined an organizational structure of people responsible for the programs and optimized allocation of resources for programs and integrated them in ways that maximized effectiveness. It should be noted, however, that SMS provide only a structure for putting together various safety programs but do not propose specific methodologies, tools and technologies for managing the system.

There have been a few publications about the sort of problems encountered by major hazards industries in implementing safety management systems (Hardy 2010; Roderick 2006). Although there are different views in the literature, there is a convergence on the following problems in putting SMS in practice in the industry.

• Safety programs often lose momentum as they take too long to demonstrate tangible benefits and high level management gets absorbed by other production requirements that are seen at odds with safety. This is mainly due to the fact that safety is not usually integrated with other business processes and appears to be an extra workload for the organization.
• Safety knowledge is scattered across the organization with people holding different views on what constitutes a significant hazard, how plant changes and risk measures may have local benefits but produce side effects at other units, who is responsible for managing safety at different units, what safety competences exist on other units and so forth.
• Safety has been perceived by people as a set of administrative controls taken by safety managers and enforced by compliance with safety procedures. Hence, sharp-end operators may fail to see how they can contribute to safety programs or may fail to report on the effectiveness of programs.
• Difficulties have been reported at choosing the right methods for hazard identification and risk analysis as well as finding appropriate data from documents, work permits, procedures and plant modifications. To overcome these problems, organizations need to set up a suitable Knowledge Management System (KMS) that makes available risk information and facilitates data transfer between risk analysis tools.
• Monitoring the effectiveness of safety programs and assessing the safety performance of organizations remain important challenges, with most organizations focusing only on reactive or lagging indicators. As a result, failures in managing plant changes and safety interventions cannot be captured at early stages as they are identified after some damage has occurred.

Even the certification of an organization with an SMS standard does not guarantee that problems in setting, running and evaluating the system will be overcome nor that there is going to be a continuing improvement in safety performance. For this reason, organizations with their own methods and ways of implementing OHSAS-18000 have achieved different results. Although surveys and benchmarks have provided some evidence of a positive relationship between SMS certification and safety performance, the evidence is not sound and has not been confirmed by scientific studies. To ensure a positive impact of safety management systems, organizations need a set of safety capabilities that would allow them to overcome the above problems.

This scientific effort has been undertaken by TOSCA (Total Operations Management for Safety Critical Activities), a European Project within the context of the 7th Framework Program aimed at developing the sort of safety capabilities that would enable organizations to make their SMS work in practice. The scope of TOSCA was to establish an economically suitable framework in which the most innovative tools and techniques (e.g., advanced 3D software, virtual reality, innovative theoretical models, updated information exchange protocols, etc.) are used together in order to take advantage of possible synergies in processing human factors requirements, fulfilling regulations, improving safety and enhancing productivity.

To achieve this, the TOSCA project developed a theoretical framework for Total Safety Management in the process industry, with a particular focus on Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). Total Safety Management (TSM) focuses on the principles, safety processes and techniques for promoting and integrating safety with other business processes for quality and productivity. This chapter looks at the guiding principles and safety processes for managing ‘total safety’ while appropriate techniques and case studies follow in the remaining chapters.

Proponents of Total Safety Management

Many Safety Management Systems currently in use by major hazards industries have been developed on the basis of ISO standards, such as OHSAS-18000, hence adopting a more ‘self-regulating’ style where safety becomes the primary responsibility of organizations. In recent years, we have witnessed new frameworks of safety management that provide a useful basis for developing a ‘performance-oriented’ approach that integrates safety with other business processes, sets goals for safety, defines the context of risk assessment and evaluates safety intervention with respect to safety goals. To this end, this section reviews a few modern approaches to safety management that have implications for building a Total Safety Management approach.

For many years, the Total Quality Management (TQM) principles have provided a basis for developing several health and safety systems. Building on TQM, Goetsch (1998) introduced the concept of Total Safety Management (TSM) as a performance-oriented approach that gives organizations a sustainable advantage in the marketplace by establishing a safe work environment that is conducive to peak performance and continual improvement. The fundamental elements of TSM include: strategic approach to safety, emphasis on performance assessment, employee empowerment, reliance upon robust methods of risk analysis and continual improvement. However, more specific and practical organizational processes for total safety have been proposed by the Strategic Safety Management (SSM) approach that emphasized an integration of safety into the corporate strategy and a demonstration of business values of safety (Rahimi 1995; Zou & Sunindijo 2015).

In a total safety approach, business processes are integrated with safety engineering techniques within a continuous improvement culture that affects all levels in the organization. In the SSM approach, the safety target becomes the analysis of ‘work processes’ rather than the analysis of isolated safety critical activities. A ‘work process’ is a complex web of interdependencies between physical entities, information, communication and knowledge channels and decision-making activities. Hence, by analyzing what is wrong with a work process, safety practitioners can evaluate the entire system and cater for safety, quality and productivity. To exploit operational feedback, the SSM relies on performance measures that relate to work processes rather than work outputs (e.g., incident and injury rates). These SSM principles have been applied by Zou and Sunindijo (2015) in the development of safety programs for the construction industry.

In the Integral Health Monitoring system (IHM), the value of health is seen as a key element of corporate policy in addition to the reduction of incidents and their associated costs (Zwetsloot 2003; Zwetsloot & van Scheppingen 2007). The IHM principles have been based on earlier TQM approaches and Business Excellence Models which provide a good basis for integrating safety with quality and other business processes. The IHM approach requires a shift from solving safety problems and reducing risks to the positive business values that safety can bring to the organization. The focus is no longer on risk reduction, medical problems or product safety but on a combination of them and their relationships to organizational and business development. In this sense, health and safety is associated with business values that increase its strategic role.

Recently, there has been an effort to integrate existing frameworks for quality (ISO 9001), management of safety (OHSAS-18000), and environmental management (ISO 14001) within a single Integrated Management System (IMS). Reasons for implementing an IMS approach include eliminating conflicts, avoiding redundant procedures and enabling a synergy among standards (Bernardo et al. 2015). The ISO 31000:2009 standard for risk assessment serves to unite different risk management processes with existing standards of quality and environmental management and offers a common approach to address risks, without necessarily leading to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• PART 1: A FRAMEWORK OF MANAGING TOTAL SAFETY
• PART 2: UNDERSTANDING HAZARDS AND RISKS
• PART 3: ESTABLISHING AND MONITORING A COMMON OPERATIONAL PICTURE
• PART 4: MANAGING KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND CHANGES IN THE CONTEXT OF BUSINESS STRATEGY
• Index