ACHIEVING OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE THROUGH A SUSTAINABLE APPROACH WITHIN PROCESS SAFETY

摘要

In the last four decades, we have seen a lot of changes within the various industries on recognizing and acknowledging risks. Learnings from catastrophic incidents in the industry led to evolution and enhancements to risk techniques as well as regulatory changes globally. Also, the last decade has seen the evolution of the concept of sustainability. One of the key elements for a company in evaluating their susta inability performance is safety that ties into company's goal to strive for operation excellence. Investigations and awareness during recent major accident events have indicated that when assessing both the short term and long term consequences of such events, the impacts seen are economic, environment and social in nature. This affects the organization's governance processes. A robust proactive risk management exercise when initiated during the concept of facility, and then carried out effectively and continuously until the demolition and decommissioning of the facility, renders success in the excellence program. Several operating companies have driven forward in this direction with the use of the either the safety case regime or various international onshore and offshore regulations. The safety program would be considered to be a sustainable program if it covers the entire process safety management lifecycle for the facility using a risk based approach, rather than a prescriptive approach. The various techniques involved would be an array of qualitative and quantitative studies. Each of these studies brings about a plethora of actions. The actions need to be addressed using a risk based approach rather than a cost based approach. This paper illustrates the authors' experience on the sustainable and sequential application of process safety methods in a risk based manner. That assures longevity for the facilities and thus operational excellence.