Aging Plants + Aging Workforce = the Risk Management Conundrum
AIChE Spring Meeting and Global Congress on Process Safety
2012
2012 Spring Meeting & 8th Global Congress on Process Safety
Global Congress on Process Safety
Poster Session
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Aging plants and an aging workforce can complicate operations when your most knowledgeable employees retire, and the road is paved with young greenhorns and decades-old equipment. Many baby boomers have stayed loyal to their company and been the knowledge keepers for the generations of lessons learned of PSM practices. When they started doing risk assessments and management of change requests, computers weren’t part of the process and “Ask Bob” was a fine way to determine if a control had been tried before and how well it worked.
As we realize when our decades of risk management experience walk out the door, we must find better ways to retain the lessons learned and turn them into best practices in our risk management programs. This brain drain will continue and behind it is a new, more fickle workforce less likely to become your knowledge repository for the next 20 years.
Risk assessment is often conducted by individual sites, separate operating units, and once provided to all the right regulatory bodies, filed away for the day an inspector shows up. Throughout the company, there may be no transparency or communication, leaving most executives vulnerable and unprepared for when an event will occur. This model worked when the average worker tenure was 25 years, but as our workforce ages and our talent pool becomes smaller, companies are forced to do more with less – including controlling risk and managing change.
The ability to clearly and effectively identify and analyze your risks is the most impactful step in the risk management process, and represents the cornerstone of any effective risk management system. Your ability to allocate resources and make better business decisions is directly related to your ability to understand the potential risks which are impacting your business. A standardized, integrated approach to risk identification and analysis is the first step in that process. Providing the tools and processes for each department, site, location, manager and employee to better identify and analyze key risks provides your company access to critical risk information.
Use of an risk management platform can enable your organization to standardize the way you identify and analyze risk, while providing a mechanism to quickly and accurately understand your risk and control profile. A risk management system can vastly increase visibility into material risks, ensure adequacy of control and provide real-time reporting throughout the business helping inform the decision making process. By providing a mechanism for all risk identification and evaluation to be completed in a standardized, integrated way, these systems are helping customers make better decisions about where to put capital to work, and helping to ensure companies meet their goals and objectives.
This paper will discuss the changing face of the workforce and the aging of equipment and how companies can be prepared to manage risk more strategically and efficiently. It will provide a guide for obtaining a standardized, centralized, enterprise-wide view of operational risk to ensure consistency and transparency.