WSH Council Issues New Guidelines on Process Safety Performance Indicators
Saturday,
02/12/2023,
09:19(GMT +7)
Singapore’s process industry is growing fast, fuelled by international investments in new projects and driven by increased demand across the region. Most of the players in the industry have good systems in place to manage highly complicated and hazardous processes. However, process accidents around the world involving big names such as those in the Oil and Gas sector remind us that these systems are vulnerable, have weaknesses and must be better managed through process safety management (PSM).
Importance of Process Safety
PSM ensures that facilities are well designed, safely operated and properly maintained. It is important in the prevention of major accidents involving leaks, spills, fires or explosions. Failing to ensure proper PSM can result in process safety accidents that are often catastrophic or serious in nature.
As process safety deals with great complexity, with multiple variables and parameters in the production process, real-time analysis, instruments and systems must be employed to measure, regulate and control these processes.
About the Guidelines
The WSH Council, in collaboration with MOM and the industry, has developed a guidelines on process safety performance indicators. Here’s a short excerpt:
The Monitoring Framework
The process safety monitoring framework evaluates the effectiveness of the organisation’s procedures or systems relating to process safety. It does so by monitoring process performance to provide assurance that process safety risks are adequately managed.
The Performance Indicators
Process safety performance indicators are monitoring indicators which measure the performance of these procedures and systems. There are two types of process safety performance indicators, namely, leading and lagging indicators:
– Leading indicators measures proactively the effectiveness of risk controls and provide feedback on safety performance before an incident or accident happens
– Examples: monitoring number of open and overdue PHA (process hazard analysis) action items and percentage of field adherence to SOPs
– Lagging indicators evaluates the adequacy of controls that are put in place
– Examples: percentage of equipment requiring breakdown maintenance and process safety incident rate
(Source: By www.wshc.sg)
