Ensuring that Multi National Company Process Safety Standards, Requirements and Recommended Practices are Complied with in All Parts of the Enterprise

Abstract

Most Chemical Companies create and maintain a set of Standards, Requirements and Recommended practices for Process and Occupational Safety. These augment the legal and industry consensus standards which exist. The process of creating, updating and maintaining these is a necessary commitment to Process Safety Management. The process of making sure that these are properly applied throughout the corporation is a very important task. Without this, all the other efforts fail. When accidents occur, it is occasionally found by the investigation that a requirement of the company has not been applied. In these cases, the root cause is found to be a failure in the implementation process. This part often turns out to be the most laborious of all. It is not enough to simply create a requirement or a recommendation and tell the organisation that it exists and they must apply it. When the topic has been researched within EPSC this has been cited as a problem. There have been particular challenges in the Mergers and Acquisitions field where an acquired facility has either continued to operate in ignorance or has not implemented necessary changes quickly enough. By breaking down the challenge into discrete steps with the issues elaborated for each, the EPSC study group has identified good practice and tools for creating, maintaining, implementing and compliance checking for each. This paper reviews these tools with a view to wider use and better performance.