Invest in Safety or Invest in Production: A Dilemma?

摘要

Amajor problem within the area of industrial safety is justifying additional investment in safety. Why should managers invest in safety if not enforced by law or demanded by insurance companies? Since industrialization, several aspects of industrial safety have been investigated and applied in industry. But why invest in safety instead of investing in, for example, pro-duction resources? Effects of additional production investments are intuitively certain but the effects of additional safety investments are not. This paper concerns the difference in appeal between safety issues and the primary Operational process. This difference makes a potential investment in primary operations appear to be a more reliable investment in terms of yield improvement, which justifies a preference for operational investments above safety investments. In this paper, the relation between "yield-from-operation" and "safety perfor-mance" is discussed, leading to a better understanding that process performance improvement and safety management are closely interconnected through the concept of controlling the business process. Both process performance and safety management strive for maximum availability of production facilities and for minimum "recovery" efforts, and both can be satisfied if the operational business process is adequately under control. Investing in safety and investing in primary operation doesn't have to be a choice, as improvement of control is the real target for investments.