Addressing Work Execution and Using Predictive Risk Indicators to Improve Business Processes, Safety Performance and Achieve Operational Excellence

摘要

Understanding and practicing effective operational risk management and improving line of sight on operations are on-going challenges for hazardous industries. Traditionally, organisations address these challenges with improving rules and implementing more robust procedures, auditing against these to measure compliance, developing new "leading" and "lagging" indicators, and generally developing better practices. These are traditional PSM responses but they are limited in their effectiveness to improve performance such as reducing the number of HiPO's, incidents, fatalities and the continuing challenge of effective engagement with the frontline remains. Frontline work execution is a key blind spot in PSM. It is the Interaction of People with Plants and amounts to increased operational risk. This Interaction represents millions of man hours every year involving hundreds of thousands of frontline workers who routinely intervene in plant operations to do repair and maintenance work often introducing new hazards, inhibiting safety systems, isolating parts of the plant and interfering with standard operating procedures. Yet as an industry we typically still manage this critical process using out dated methods. Paper based systems only manage each job as a single unrelated point of activity and provide us with no line of sight on the potential cumulative risk of frontline work. Furthermore, these systems do not generate easily accessible data and there is a high reliance on individual competencies. Technology can play an integral role in guiding and structuring decision making in this space by ensuring safety rules, best practices and lessons learned are deeply embedded into operational processes for frontline workers and management. In this way, risk controls and guidance can take shape outside of the 'rule book' and become an integral part of routine operations. Ensuring workers consistently apply "best-practice"- whether these are rules, regulations, processes or lessons learned, not only provides safety and assurance benefits but also delivers efficiency gains: better ways of working, improving corporate knowledge base, shorter execution time and reduced administration. Overtime this structure better supports behavioural and culture change, achieving milestones and eliminating any disconnect between industry regulations and organisational objectives. Using modern systems, the data inherent in building and completing permits for the future execution of work can now be assembled automatically into cumulative risk profiles and predictive risk indicators, enabling work planning decisions to be optimised on the basis of both safety and work efficiency. Real time predictions of risk profiles enable proactive intervention to minimise risks and prevent incidents. Operational Performance and Predictive Risk Solutions not only provide the means to understand safety performance, but can provide a more complete picture on work execution and overall business performance. For the first time, operators can have the peace of mind that key policies, procedures and regulations are in practice ensuring compliance, and demonstrating that it is actually working towards the company's objectives and senior management has the leading indicators for a key operational risk area, the Interaction of People on the Plant. Senior management now has a feedback loop they can use to better understand their operational risk and also see the relationship between delivering performance and operational risk.