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Enhance Risk Management Using Risk Based Process Safety

Safety practices and formal safety management systems have existed in most industry segments for many years. Nevertheless, many organizations continue to be challenged by inadequate management system performance, resource pressure, risk blindness, and stagnant safety performance.
Effective efforts to manage risk must be based on an adequate understanding of:
  • The hazards and risks of your organization’s facilities and operations.
  • Resources and capabilities needed to manage your organization’s risk controls.
  • How the effectiveness of safety activities are influenced by the organization’s culture.
Effective risk management serves as a preventative process that identifies and controls exposures that threaten the reliability and effectiveness of your processes. Work safety risk assessments can help organizations systematically identify and document risks and hazards arising from specific activities in an organization, and propose improvement plans that prioritize resource allocation based on risk.
Why is Risk Identification and Management Important?
Ineffective risk management can be deadly in the workplace. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a total of 5,333 workers died from a work-related injury in the U.S. in 2019, up 2 percent from the 2018 total of 5,250. It is also the largest annual number since 2007. Similarly, significant fires and spills in the process industries continue to occur on a far-too-frequent basis.
Focusing on risk identification and management will reduce organizational blind spots, which ultimately leads to greater control of exposure and improved organizational reliability. Improvement opportunities can be developed for organizations facing challenges, such as:
  • Weak and inconsistent approaches to risk analysis.
  • Risk management not integrated with strategy-setting and performance management.
  • Significant accidents with catastrophic consequence potential.
  • Regulatory citations and other stakeholder dissatisfaction with safety performance.
  • Potential acquisition of organization in hazardous operations that differs from legacy business.

Our Approach

Organizational Process Safety (OPS) Consulting is DEKRA’s answer to the call for innovative solutions to persistent challenges involving effective risk management. Drawing on decades of experience, DEKRA experts have designed an approach to risk-based process safety that incorporates technical management systems with organizational culture and capability. Based on the Center for Chemical Process Safety risk-based process safety model, the approach is flexible, scalable, and applicable to any industry.
OPS examines the critical areas of Risk- Based Process Safety, generating reproducible results, customized recommendations and a road map for improvement. OPS goes beyond compliance and existing process safety systems to bring industries closer to zero harm.
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DEKRA structures OPS around Risk-Based Process Safety (RBPS), a continuous improvement method that involves a cycle of assessment, implementation, and monitoring. OPS is a distinct, evolved approach to Process Safety Management (PSM).
The OPS solution expands the view of Process Safety beyond traditional technical systems to assess an organization’s capabilities and culture. Its methodology goes a step further to minimize subjectivity by providing:
  • An objective, scalable, precise, and reproducible measure of the maturity level of your site or organization.
  • Optimal interventions to improve your organization’s maturity level, and benchmarking indicators to monitor this progress.
  • The ability to conduct meaningful benchmarking across sites and geographical areas, with an assessment tool that has all the features of a reliable metric.
  • An expert assessment of both the capabilities and culture underpinning your organization’s risk management program carried out efficiently with your resources and personnel.
  • A roadmap to optimizing process safety management in your organization.
How DEKRA Can Help
DEKRA Organizational Process Safety consulting services enables leadership to understand and address the underlying factors that contribute to process safety risk, uncover organizational blind spots, and identify cultural and leadership factors that contribute to effective exposure control. This solution is particularly relevant for the chemical, consumer goods, transportation, and logistics industries.
DEKRA’s approach combines our world-renowned technical expertise in Process Safety with our industry-leading scientific perspectives on Organizational Safety and Reliability. DEKRA provides a comprehensive solution set and organizational change model with a focus on cultural change, governance, leadership development, employee participation and risk control systems.
We work with your team to understand why early warning signals are overlooked and what can be done to improve identification and response. These efforts align with developing the attributes of a High Reliability Organization that reduces the potential for catastrophic incidents.
Relevant Resources