Search form

Human Factors & Culture

Human factors and culture plays crucial roles in process safety and creating an organization’s safety culture. Safety culture is defined as how the organization behaves when no one is watching. The responsibility for fostering and sustaining a sound safety culture cascades down through an organization/company.

Two Incompetent Workers; Too Close for Comfort ñ Part 1

Apr 4, 2012
Mike Broadribb
Learning from experience is one of the four pillars of Risk-Based Process Safety. Incidents that occur at one facility often provide opportunities to strengthen management systems at other facilities. Sharing the technical lessons learned from incidents is morally right and vital to improving...

Taking a Risk for Safety

Apr 3, 2012
Ian Sutton
Taking a Risk for Safety Over the last twenty years companies in the process industries have invested heavily in their occupational safety programs. These investments of time and money have been made in many areas, including training, behavior-based safety and the use of PPE. The results have been...

PSM ? Process Safety Leadership: Practical Actions That Set PS Leadership Apart

Apr 3, 2012
Dawn Wurst
PSM ≠ Process Safety Leadership : Practical actions that set PS Leadership apart It is well known in business improvement circles that good management does not necessarily equal good leadership. This applies to PSM as well. Effectively leading the translation of PSM to action for all whom it...

Social HAZOP At Oil Refine Industry

Apr 2, 2012
Salvador ¡vila Filho
Introduction Maintenance of process safety in the industry several tools are used such as Risk Analysis, Failure mode and events Analysis (FMEA), a Hazard operability analysis (HAZOP), Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA), and Mapping Risk. Each tool or technique, if used at the right time can prevent...

ìWell the Team Has Met and Completed the PHAÖ.Now What?î

Apr 2, 2012
Dewana Tarpley
Learning from the experiences and expertise of others has long been recognized as a valued process when completing PHAs. The gathering of a multi-disciplinary review allows facilities to succeed in a path of continuous improvement by evaluating the current and future state of the process based on...

PSM Metrics Impact on Process Safety Culture

Mar 15, 2011
Bill Patton
Several years ago our facility recognized the need to expand from a PSM Program managed by a small group to a PSM Culture owned by the full facility. Development and implementation of effective and consistent PSM metrics were utilized to achieve the following: (1) Set the vision for a PSM Culture (...

It's People, Stupid! Human Factors In Incident Investigation

Mar 14, 2011
Mike Broadribb
People have inherent strengths and weaknesses which can affect their performance. Issues such as fatigue, emotional stress, and motivation can adversely affect performance. Their performance is also influenced by factors external to the individual, such as poor equipment design, inadequate training...

A Key Factor In Hazardous Processes: Safety Culture

Mar 14, 2011
Charles A. Soczek
The significance of Safety Culture is becoming increasingly recognized as a key factor to achieve the safe operation of hazardous processes. This paper describes the four stages that manufacturing companies go through in their journey to a world class safety culture and applies this concept to...

LOPA – Validating Human IPLs and Ies

Mar 14, 2011
Bill Bridges
Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA) is a simplified risk assessment method that provides an order of magnitude estimate of the risk of a potential accident scenario. Humans can be the cause on an accident scenario (the Initiating Event [IE]) or human can serve as an independent protection layer (...

The UK Experience In Managing Risks Arising From Human Error

Mar 13, 2011
David Embrey
Following the Piper Alpha incident in the North Sea, both offshore and onshore Oil and Gas operators in the UK were required under the COMAH (Control of Major Accident Hazards) regulations to submit a Safety Case setting out how the risks in their installations were to be managed. After many years...

Human Performance Training

Mar 13, 2011
Don D. Nguyen
Operator competency has been a major challenge for the petrochemical and refining industry for decades. In recent times, human factors are believed to be a consistent contributing cause for a lot of incidents. Current schemes used to determine an operator's competency are subjective and somewhat...

Evaluating Human Response to an Alarm for LOPA or Safety Studies

Mar 23, 2010
Robert J. Stack
Many LOPA scenarios have an independent protection layer (IPL) credit for operator intervention to prevent or mitigate the scenario. It is often difficult for the LOPA team or other safety teams to assess if the appropriate operator response credit is being taken. To allow a more consistent...

Near-Miss Management to Develop Dynamic Leading Indicators to Predict Incidents

Mar 23, 2010
Ankur Pariyani
Recent studies have shown the importance of identifying near-misses to predict the probability of accidents (Meel and Seider, 2006) – and managing them to reduce the potential of accidents (Phimister et al., 2003; Cooke and Rohleder, 2006). In this paper, new methodologies involving near-miss...

Elements of Human Factors Missing from Process Safety

Mar 23, 2010
Revonda Tew
Process safety is about controlling risk of failures and errors; controlling risk is primarily about reducing the risk of human error. All elements of Risk-Based Process Safety (RBPS) and alternative standards for process safety (such as US OSHA's standard for Process Safety Management [PSM] or ACC...

Pages

Subscribe to Human Factors & Culture