Process Safety & Leadership: Strategies to Deliver Stakeholders ROI (With Case Studies Examples)

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Excellence in Plants Process Safety & Risk Management

Part of process safety excellence is having a strong, committed process safety culture, starting from the top.  It is one of the most important tasks of leaders in the processing industries — to set a culture and guide an organization to hold process safety as important as profit margins and return on investment. Every aspect of the organization must include process safety principles and tools to minimise the poor impacts on workers, communities, and the environment.

Development and implementation of robust Process Safety Management (PSM) systems is a primary focus for leading companies in the petrochemical oil and gas industry. Regulations have been passed in the United States and in Europe, where companies handling/processing hazardous chemicals are required to implement PSM systems.

In addition to safety, a strong process safety culture ensures that you deliver a high return to stakeholders. Here are some examples of strategies used to balance process safety with delivering a high return to stakeholders used by industry leaders:

• Dow Chemical
• Eastman Chemical
• ExxonMobil

Dow Chemical

• Set long-term goals

Leaders who have their long-term goals in mind, make better informed decisions as it guides the decision made to deliver safety progress and financial performance. This holds the organisation accountable for everything they do while keeping the stakeholders’ interests in mind. For example, Dow’s decade-long sustainability goals, as well as through critical industry initiatives like the Center for Chemical Process Safety.

Eastman Chemical

• Reliability as a preferred supplier

Improving the process safety culture not only reduces the number of process safety incidents, but also improves the image of the organistion and they will be seen as a reliable supplier. By incorporating process safety as a strategic business strategy move, all decisions made are centered around safety and this increases the ROI for stakeholders.

ExxonMobil

• Improving process safety increases return for stakeholders

Managing process safety has both a moral and business imperative to safety. The consequences of a safety incident not only result in a loss of life, but also affects the value of the business to shareholders and the economy. Additional costs include the business and financial resources used to recover from the incident, the disruption to the affected plant and other plants in the organisation.

When the industry fails to fulfill their fundamental responsibility to operate safely, it can undermine the confidence of the public and the trust of the regulators. This, too, carries far-reaching consequences and may result in new regulations and legal requirements, and it can take a long time to earn back the respect and goodwill.

Excellence in Plants Process Safety & Risk Management is a 3-day training course held on 27-29 June 2019 (Singapore) and 1-3 July 2019 (Kuala Lumpur). Designed to provide an insight into the major drivers into fire and explosion hazard risk, and the various methods of preventing and mitigating such risk. The course will discuss quantitative consequence analysis, such as vapor dispersion modeling, vapor cloud explosion modeling, fire modeling, and presents the details necessary to perform such analyses. In addition, it will focus on the fire and gas detection systems for offshore and onshore process areas, and how such systems can be used to lower the overall explosion risk to facilities.

27-29 June 2019 (Singapore)

1-3 July 2019 (Kuala Lumpur)