Measuring Process Safety to Drive PSM Excellence

摘要

For NOVA Chemicals' Styrenics business, several measurements are used to drive improvements in process safety performance and management systems. We employ the traditional lagging indicators collected by the American Chemical Council (fire or explosion with greater than $25,000 in property damage, release of chemical substance above the reportable quantity, serious injury or fatality). In addition, NOVA Chemicals tracks a very wide category of uncontrolled process fires, which includes even the smallest 1-in. flame on a polystyrene extruder diehead or evidence of a fire, such as charring. On the leading indicator side, the Styrenics business uses a combination of the results of facility self-assessments and surveys. We use both our 3-year process safety self-assessments and our World Class PSM Surveys to develop the PSM action plans for each year. These action plans are part of the PSM metric by which every site leader is measured and rewarded. The specific activities that must be completed by year-end are developed by the plants, as well as the "stretch goals," which represent a breakthrough in performance. Another element of our PSM tracking mechanism is how well we perform during our corporate audits; we measure how well each site performs on a five-point scale and have business-wide goals for performance. During the year 2001, we will also be measuring the awareness of our site leaders of the elements of process safety management. This combination of lagging and leading indicators has resulted in fewer serious process-safety related incidents and the losses that are associated with them.