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Organizational Process Safety
Risk-Based Process Safety: An Enhanced Approach to Risk Management
High hazard industries have long invested in process safety management systems. As consumers and the public increasingly scrutinize the safety practices of companies of all sizes, interest in Process Safety (PS) has grown. A new approach is to use the principles of High Reliability Organizations (HROs) to transform your process safety system.
Conventional PS management, often compliance-oriented and dictated by regulatory bodies such as OSHA or Seveso, has not prevented disasters from happening. Traditional audits, while appropriate for evaluating a program against a given standard, fail to address organizations’ capability and culture, which are critical in determining process safety outcomes.
Organizational Process Safety (OPS) is DEKRA’s answer to the call for innovative solutions to persistent process safety challenges and a more effective process safety management system. Drawing on decades of experience with partners in the oil, gas, pharmaceutical, and chemical sectors, our experts have designed a ground-breaking approach to risk-based process safety that incorporates organizational culture and capability, as well as human factors. The approach is based on the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) risk-based process safety model and utilizes the critical areas identified by the best-in-class tool. The result is a flexible, scalable approach that is applicable to any industry. Our process generates reproducible results, customized recommendations, and a roadmap for improvement. OPS goes beyond compliance and existing process safety systems to help your team create a High Reliability Organization (HRO).
DEKRA's Organizational Process Safety Framework
Your Benefits
- 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 your 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.
Our Approach
We structure our OPS service around Risk-Based Process Safety, a continuous improvement method that involves a cycle of assessment, improvement implementation, and monitoring. OPS is our distinct and pragmatic approach to Process Safety Management with tools that specifically address an organization’s capabilities and culture.
True to our values and role as trusted advisors, we listen carefully to to ensure that our approach is adapted to your needs. A general outline of the process:
- Discussion: Together we meet to determine the scope of the service, identifying the areas of the organization and workstreams to be assessed.
- Targeted assessment: Specialists familiar with your technology perform assessments that determine the PS maturity level within each identified workstream, and each receives a benchmark score for future monitoring.
- Prioritization and recommendations: Assessment results are prioritized so that weaker areas are addressed more urgently than relatively strong ones; interventions are proposed that promote maturity progress.
- Implementation support: Specialists are available in this optional stage to assist with the implementation of interventions.
- Reassessment: Within five years, an organization can request a follow-up assessment to measure progress and redirect efforts.
Our targeted assessment precisely measures and evaluates an organization’s maturity in OPS. The result identifies whether your site has an avoidance-, compliance-, or values-driven culture.
Why DEKRA?
DEKRA’s Organizational Process Safety consulting services enables leadership to understand and address the underlying factors that contribute to catastrophic safety risk, uncover organizational blind spots, and identify cultural and leadership factors that contribute to effective exposure control.
As a starting point, DEKRA assesses the critical factors that influence the level of organizational risk, effectiveness of risk mitigation, and sustainability of exposure control. The assessment results allow leadership to identify targeted solutions that address the most impactful issues facing your organization.
DEKRA’s approach combines our world-renowned technical expertise in Process Safety with industry-leading scientific perspectives on Organizational Safety and Reliability. DEKRA provides a comprehensive solution set and organizational change model with a focus on culture 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.
We also work with you to build a Learning Organization where risks are systematically identified, controls sustainably implemented, and performance is monitored in order to develop the attributes of a HRO and reduce the potential for catastrophic incidents.
Contact us to learn more about moving your team towards becoming a High Reliability Organization.
Organizational Process Safety focuses on the leadership, culture, governance, decision making, and organizational factors that influence process safety performance. It helps organizations understand how workplace culture and management systems affect risk controls, exposure management, operational decisions, and the consistent application of process safety practices.
Significant process safety incidents may involve organizational factors that extend beyond equipment, procedures, or regulatory compliance. Organizational Process Safety helps leaders identify cultural, governance, communication, and decision making issues that could increase risk. Addressing these factors can strengthen process safety culture and support more sustainable safety performance.
A process safety maturity assessment evaluates how effectively an organization manages process safety risks and applies its safety practices. The assessment can identify strengths, gaps, and improvement opportunities while examining organizational factors that influence operational reliability, risk awareness, employee participation, and process safety performance.
Traditional Process Safety Management generally focuses on technical controls, procedures, systems, and compliance requirements. Organizational Process Safety examines the leadership, cultural, governance, and organizational conditions that determine whether those systems work consistently in practice. It provides a broader understanding of how process safety leadership influences everyday performance.
An organizational process safety assessment can benefit organizations that manufacture, process, store, or handle hazardous materials. It is particularly valuable for organizations seeking to strengthen risk management, improve operational reliability, evaluate decision making practices, or better understand how leadership and workplace culture affect process safety performance.
Organizational factors may include leadership engagement, communication, accountability, employee participation, governance structures, risk awareness, decision making processes, and the ability to recognize and respond to warning signs. A process safety culture assessment can help determine how these factors support or weaken the organization’s safety systems and controls.
A High Reliability Organization consistently manages complex, high risk operations while maintaining a strong focus on risk identification, learning, operational discipline, and continuous improvement. Within organizational process safety, high reliability attributes help organizations recognize vulnerabilities, respond to warning signs, and maintain effective risk controls during changing conditions.
Organizational Process Safety assessments help identify gaps, prioritize actions, and strengthen the leadership and cultural factors that support sustainable performance. Process safety consulting can help organizations translate those findings into focused process safety improvement initiatives and direct resources toward the areas most likely to reduce risk.
An organization should consider a process safety culture assessment after significant organizational changes, acquisitions, leadership transitions, major incidents, or operational challenges. An evaluation may also be conducted as part of a process safety maturity assessment or a broader process safety improvement initiative.
After an organizational process safety assessment, the organization typically receives insights into its strengths, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for improvement. Prioritized recommendations can help process safety leadership focus resources, strengthen organizational systems, improve workplace culture, and support more reliable long term process safety performance.
