(116d) YES You Cancase Study of Implementing a Center for Chemical Process Safety Risk Based Process Safety (CCPS RBPS) Management System

This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities that arise in the implementation of a risk-based process safety management system in a hazardous materials facility in the chlorine-alkali industry, starting from a relatively low level of compliance with standards, rules of good art and a general lack of knowledge of the basic principles of process safety.

The motivation to begin the implementation of risked based process safety (RBPS) was an external audit requested by the company in November 2017 to evaluate its compliance with several pamphlets from the Chlorine Institute. At that time, the organization did not have a process safety sector and safety efforts were oriented towards personal safety. The final report included a long list of recommendations, each of them associated with good practice from the CI pamphlets. These recommendations were also associated with one of the 20 elements of the CCPS RBPS.

The authors discuss how the implementation plan was developed, the awareness and training of the top and middle levels of the organization's leadership to support the project, the mechanism for selecting priorities and the process of preparing the schedule including scope, responsibility and compliance dates.

The paper discusses examples of improvement in facilities, equipment, systems, and procedures in the operational, maintenance, engineering, etc. sectors, the incorporation of systematic and rigorous hazard identification and risk analysis techniques, and the benefits of implementation and monitoring the recommendations suggested in the studies. The strong leadership commitment and the process monitoring methodology by the company's senior management drives the implementation and gives visibility to the management system within the entire organization..

The authors also discusses the economic results of the implementation and quantify the impact of the improvements.

The pandemic unleashed in the world altered the course of implementation of the process safety management system. The paper discusses the alternative and exceptional measures adopted to mitigate this impact and the results of those measures.

While it is true that the progress toward total implementation of RBPS is very important, it also important to understand what is missing to achieve the full implementation of the 20 elements of RBPS, the appropriate level of maturity necessary in the culture of the organization to achieve continuous improvement and what is the plan to address the challenges to reach each stage of implementation.

The authors encourage all organizations that have not yet implemented a process safety management system to understand that it can be done, even in less than ideal conditions, with very old facilities and a poor or non-existent process safety culture if there is a strong commitment from the top leadership of the organization.