An Integrated Toolkit for Addressing Human Factors Issues in Process Safety

This paper describes an integrated toolset, called the Human Factors Workbench, which addresses the proactive and reactive control of human error in process operations. It is a practical application of the tools described in the CCPS publication: ‘Guidelines for Preventing Human Error in Process Safety'. The paper provides case studies to show how the toolset has been applied by oil and gas multinationals to successfully satisfy the requirements of safety regulators in a number of countries, and the development of risk assessed procedures that will minimize the likelihood of errors and violations. The toolset encourages the active involvement of the workforce in error prevention. The first module involves operators in analyzing the way that safety critical tasks are carried in practice, to identify likely failure modes, their consequences and potential risk control measures. The second module provides a human reliability assessment facility, to evaluate the quality of the operational conditions and an estimate of the probability of error based on these evaluations. The final module supports a structured incident investigation process, based on the identification of the human and hardware elements that were involved in an incident, and the underlying causal factors.