Building an Executive Information System for Maintenance Efficiency in Petrochemical Plants—An Evaluation

This study used the manufacturing process in the petrochemical industries as an example and developed a dedicated maintenance programme and executive information system (EIS) for this industry. The software for EIS was established on a CMMS platform, with logical and extractive analysis used to store the information in a KPI databank. The system developed can provide plant managers and engineers with a complete summary of information and keep them updated regarding the present status of their maintenance efforts. The objective of this study was to establish a management system for maintaining knowledge in the petrochemical industries, such as the management of standard operating procedures (SOPs), historical records and the analysis of data for the facility. To design the software, a review of petrochemical facility was purposed to enhance the maintenance efforts and facilitate the decision-making process. The main functions of the system include asset reliability analysis, failure analysis and maintenance benefit cost analysis. For the petrochemical industry, the impact of safety and environment caused by equipment malfunction is more substantial than that of other industries. If executives can manage essential points effectively and make decisions according to a key performance index, risks to safety and environment, which result from equipment malfunction, can be decreased and safety can be enhanced for petrochemical refineries.     

Building Safety indicators: Part 2 – Application,practices and results

Petroleum exploration and production in the Barents Sea is a controversial topic. The Goliat field outside the northern coast of Norway will be the first offshore oil development in this region, with planned production start in 2013–2014. Avoiding major accidents at Goliat is critical; not only to reduce the risks to human lives and the environment, but also to gain political acceptance. Providing early warnings of major accidents for Goliat is one of the main objectives of the research project ‘Building Safety’. The objective of this paper is to describe the development of early warnings in the form of indicators. In addition, the paper includes an overview of current status of early warnings of accidents in other major hazard industries; the nuclear power industry, the chemical process industry, and aviation. Experiences from these industries, including lessons learned from recent major accidents, have been used as important input to the development of early warning indicators.     

海外石油天然气行业的承包商安全管理

出于技术和经济上的考虑,中国石油海外勘探开发公司（CNODC）作为中国石油天然气集团公司（CNPC）海外油气业务投资主体一直将大部分核心业务外包给不同专业领域的承包商。由于石油天然气行业相对较高的安全环保风险、资源国用工政策限制、合作伙伴利益冲突、承包商HSE文化成熟度差异、作业公司承包商HSE管理漏洞等原因,CNODC在计划、招标、评标、合同签订、合同执行等各个阶段都面临着承包商HSE管理方面的多重挑战。为了加强对外包合同的前瞻性HSE管理和全过程HSE监督,从2007年至今CNODC通过推行承包商HSE管理强化计划,成功地完善了合同管理政策和承包商HSE管理体系,推动各海外项目公司将HSE管理重心从合同执行阶段前移到计划和招标、投标和合同签订阶段,规范了项目公司对合同执行阶段的现场监督、HSE业绩监测和考评,有效减少了承包商安全事故和环境事件,实现了CNODC与承包商HSE绩效的双赢。     

Safety-culture in a Norwegian shipping company

Problem: Although there has been considerable interest in safety culture and safety climate in many industries, little attention has been given to safety culture in one of the world's riskiest industries, shipping. Method: Using both self developed items and items from published research on safety culture, safety climate, and quality and management style, a 40-item safety culture questionnaire was developed. The questionnaire was distributed in a self-administered form to sailors onboard 20 vessels and to officers attending a seminar in Manila. A total of 349 questionnaires were collected (total response rate, 60%). Results, discussion and impact on industry: Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed 11 factors when the Kaiser eigenvalue rule was used and four factors when the scree test criterion was used. The factor structure in the material confirmed structures found in other industries. The relative importance of the factors from the factor analysis on “level of safety” measures was tested by canonical correlation analysis and regression analysis. The results confirmed previous research and showed that the most important factors were influential across industries. To determine weather differences existed between nationalities, occupations, and vessels the factors from the PCA was subjected to Multiple Discriminant Analysis. Significant differences between occupations, nations, and vessels were found on one or more of the factors from the PCA.     

On the use of criteria based on the SMART acronym to assess quality of performance indicators for safety management in process industries

Management of safety, and barriers in particular, includes using information expressing performance, i.e. use of safety performance indicators. For this information to be useful, the indicators should demonstrate adequate quality. In other words, they should satisfy some predefined set of quality criteria. Without showing adequate quality, the indicators are generally unable to provide sufficient support for barrier management, which could result in poor decisions. In this article, the use of the SMART criteria is considered to assess the quality of safety performance indicators in process industries. SMART being an acronym for ‘specificity’, ‘measurability’ or ‘manageability’, ‘achievability’, ‘relevancy’ and ‘time-based’, covering five key aspects and criteria for assessing the quality of an indicator. A discussion on whether the indicators are able to demonstrate adequate quality by satisfying these criteria has been conducted. The finding is that all of the SMART criteria should be satisfied for a safety performance indicator to demonstrate acceptable quality and to be regarded as useful to support barrier management decision-making. However, it has also been observed that including the ‘M’ criterion in the assessment of quality is not needed. When all the other criteria are satisfied there is no way the conclusions could be misleading as a result of measurability or manageability aspects. Hence, for safety performance indicator quality, only four of the criteria are assessed and suggested for such situations to shorten the acronym to ‘STAR’. A key safety indicator used in downstream process facilities, i.e. ‘dangerous fluid overfilling events’, motivated from the 2005 Texas City refinery accident, is used to illustrate the situation. The indicator is also applied to another incident, the Buncefield oil storage depot's accident in 2005, to provide a broader context for using it. The findings in this article could also be applied beyond the context studied. This means that, despite focusing on safety indicators in the process industries, the findings are considered as relevant and applicable to other types of performance indicators and to other energy industries.     

Fuzzy risk modeling of process operations in the oil and gas refineries

Operating several assets has resulted in more complexity and so occurrence of some major accidents in the refining industries. The process operations risk factors including failure frequency and the consequence components like employees' safety and environment impacts, operation downtime, direct and indirect cost of operations and maintenance, and mean time to repair should be considered in the analysis of these major accidents in any refinery. Considering all of these factors, the risk based maintenance (RBM) as a proper risk assessment methodology minimizes the risk resulting from asset failures. But, one of the main engineering problems in risk modeling of the complex industries like refineries is uncertainty due to the lack of information. This paper proposes a model for the risk of the process operations in the oil and gas refineries. The fuzzy logic system (FLS) was proposed for risk modeling. The merit of using fuzzy model is to overcome the uncertainty of the RBM components. This approach also can be accounted as a benchmark for future failures. A unified risk number would be obtained to show how the criticality of units is. The case study of a gas plant in an oil refinery is performed to illustrate the application of the proposed model and a comparison between the results of both traditional RBM and fuzzy method is made.For the case study, 26 asset failures were identified. The fuzzy risk results show that 3 failures have semi-critical level and other 23 failures are non-critical. In both traditional and fuzzy RBM methods, some condenser failures had the highest risk number and some pumps were prioritized to have the lowest risk level. The unit with unified risk number less than 40 is in the non-critical conditions. Proposed methodology is also applicable to other industries dealing with process operations risks.     

Identifying elements of poor construction safety management in China

Construction is one of the most hazardous industries due to its unique nature. Measured by international standards, construction site safety records in China are poor. This paper aims to examine the status of safety management in the Chinese construction industry, explore the risk-prone activities on construction sites, and identify factors affecting construction site safety. The findings reveal that the behavior of contractors on safety management are of grave concern, including the lack of provision of personal protection equipment, regular safety meetings, and safety training. The main factors affecting safety performance include ‘poor safety awareness of top management’, ‘lack of training’, ‘poor safety awareness of project managers’, ‘reluctance to input resources to safety’ and ‘reckless operations’. The study also proposes that the government should play a more critical role in stricter legal enforcement and organizing safety training programs.     

结合系统工程理论改善承包商安全管理

承包商事故在国内外事故中都占据着很高的比例.加强承包商安全管理是所有企业所面临的一个重要课题,应当引起各级管理者的重视.承包商安全管理涉及因素众多,可遵循系统工程方法论对其进行研究.对层次分析法和回归分析等理论在承包商安全管理中的应用进行了探讨.探讨了系统权重计算、系统决策、系统评估、系统预测的方法.建立了一个可以选择最优方案,对安全管理措施进行预先改进,实现闭环控制并且能够依据工作中的实际情况不断自我改进的系统模型,并根据假设的数据演示了该模型的建立步骤和计算方法.     

城市燃气事故生命损失风险可接受标准研究

为提高我国城市燃气风险管理水平,帮助风险管理者科学地分配维护资源,探讨提出了我国城市燃气事故生命损失风险可接受标准;采用AIR指标法确定了个人风险可接受标准范围为(2.397 3×10-7,4.794 7×10-7);运用F-N曲线法结合ALARP原则,确定了社会风险可接受标准,最大可接受风险的截距为4.794 7×10-7,可忽略风险的截距为4.794 7×10-8;利用生活质量指数推导模型,计算了达到城市燃气事故可忽略风险水平的最优安全投入成本;基于风险动态原则,分析提出了风险可接受标准的更新办法。研究结果表明:我国城市燃气行业可接受风险水平低于煤矿、大坝、化工等危险行业的可接受风险水平;虽然我国城市燃气事故死亡率逐年降低,但要达到可忽略的风险水平,每年还需大量安全资金投入。     

From safety culture to safety orientation: Validation and simplification of a safety orientation scale using a sample of seafarers working for Norwegian ship owners

Measuring safety performance is becoming increasingly important in many high-risk industries such as atomic power, the chemical industry, offshore oil production, air traffic control and construction. Much has been done to study the antecedents/factors that shape the safety culture and safety climate in these types of industries, but almost no research has been conducted into another high-risk industry – shipping. Based on the safety orientation model (SOM) and a review of items and scales used in surveys of safety climate and safety culture, a safety orientation scale (SOS) was developed and refined through the use of multivariate statistics. This study was conducted with a sample of seafarers sailing on Norwegian-owned vessels. A total of 2558 questionnaires were returned from 141 vessels and 16 shipping companies, giving a calculated response rate of 70%.The study showed that replicating previous studies on the sample of seafarers demonstrated a large degree of stability in scales and items across both industries and nations.Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is the most commonly adopted approach to the development of scales of safety climate and culture scale reported in the literature, and factor retention seems to be the most important decision in EFA. In the present study several rules to determine the number of factors and items retained are applied, and a comparison is made of a short form of latent root criterion (SFLRC) and parallel criterion (PC). SFLRC is found to be the superior method for the present data set.Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) did not support the preliminary SOM of 12 dimensions (13 dimensions, since one of the 12 dimensions was split during the CFA procedure); however, a re-specification of the model on the basis of the CFA for four different behavioural measures gave a simplified and well-defined model with seven factors and 22 items.     

Ethics and fundamental principles of risk acceptance criteria

Ethics are concerned with distinguishing between what actions are “right” and “wrong” and what values are “good” and “bad”, etc. and there is a long academic tradition in discussing ethics and ethical theories. Risk acceptance criteria, on the other hand, distinguish between levels of risks that are acceptable and levels that are intolerable. In some sense, one may say that risk acceptance criteria distinguishes between “good” and “bad” systems and activities with regards to the risk they expose the society or elements of a society to and there is thus an obvious link between ethics and risk acceptance criteria or to risk management at large. However, there are few references in the literature that explores this link, and in this paper, the ethical foundation of fundamental principles of risk acceptance criteria will be elaborated upon.This paper considers some important principles for establishing risk acceptance criteria for safety critical systems and activities. The various principles and the philosophies behind them might at first sight seem contradictory and exclusive, but it is demonstrated how they may coexist in one and the same regulatory regime; They may complement each other in order to achieve the overall safety objectives of society. Then, some brief considerations of the ethical foundations for the principles will be given and some relevant examples of actual risk acceptance criteria will be given from the maritime industries. However, it is believed that the principles and discussions are of general interest and apply to all areas of technical risk and to safety regulations in a broader perspective.     

中国煤矿员工文化程度及对安全的影响分析

我国煤矿员工文化程度低一直被看作是煤炭企业的安全生产的重要制约因素之一,而把事故归咎于矿工的文化水平也引起了广泛争议。本文通过广泛收集国内外相关文献信息,将我国煤矿员工与美国、加拿大和南非的煤矿员工及国内其他行业的员工文化程度进行对比,发现我国煤矿员工平均收教育年限较国外少3.3年,与国内其他高危行业持平,但低于全国劳动力平均受教育水平。在现场调研数据的基础上,分析了员工文化程度对安全生产的影响情况,发现煤矿员工的文化程度与企业总体安全文化水平呈正相关关系,而且文化程度与煤矿的安全生产状况互为因果。     

Safety compliance and safety climate: A repeated cross-sectional study in the oil and gas industry

IntroductionViolations of safety rules and procedures are commonly identified as a causal factor in accidents in the oil and gas industry. Extensive knowledge on effective management practices related to improved compliance with safety procedures is therefore needed. Previous studies of the causal relationship between safety climate and safety compliance demonstrate that the propensity to act in accordance with prevailing rules and procedures is influenced to a large degree by workers' safety climate. Commonly, the climate measures employed differ from one study to another and identical measures of safety climate are seldom tested repeatedly over extended periods of time. This research gap is addressed in the present study.MethodThe study is based on a survey conducted four times among sharp-end workers of the Norwegian oil and gas industry (N = 31,350). This is done by performing multiple tests (regression analysis) over a period of 7 years of the causal relationship between safety climate and safety compliance. The safety climate measure employed is identical across the 7-year period.ConclusionsTaking all periods together, the employed safety climate model explained roughly 27% of the variance in safety compliance. The causal relationship was found to be stable across the period, thereby increasing the reliability and the predictive validity of the factor structure. The safety climate factor that had the most powerful effect on safety compliance was work pressure.Practical applicationsThe factor structure employed shows high predictive validity and should therefore be relevant to organizations seeking to improve safety in the petroleum sector. The findings should also be relevant to other high-hazard industries where safety rules and procedures constitute a central part of the approach to managing safety.     

The role of safe work method statements in the Australian construction industry

The aim of this study was to determine how managers and workers interpret and use safe work method statements (SWMS) in the Australian construction industry in order to explore if there was a gap between work as imagined and work as performed. Despite recent improvements in its safety performance, the Australian construction industry continues to be among the top four most dangerous industries within which to work. SWMS are a key strategy relied upon by the construction industry to reduce this toll. However, few, if any studies have looked at the role of SWMS in creating a safe workplace. This ethnographic study focused on the role of SWMS at two commercial construction sites in Australia. The researcher spent 6 months ‘getting to know’ the organisation before conducting 18 semi-structured interviews spanning labourers, supervisors and managers. The researcher also collected examples of completed SWMS. This study found: (1) that SWMS are important for safety, particularly for tasks that are out of the ordinary; (2) that social interaction as well as SWMS are important for safety; (3) gaps do exist between work as imagined in a SWMS and work as performed in practice, but in the minds of those on site, there were no unresolved gaps; (4) therefore construction companies must identify and resolve the gaps between SWMS, practice and task demands to make construction sites a safer place to work.     

化工行业安全管理人员的胜任力研究

为了完善化工行业安全管理人员的人力资源管理系统,对安全管理人员的胜任力进行了访谈研究和问卷调查,在探索性因素分析的基础上建立了安全管理人员的胜任力模型,并分析了个胜任力要素的重要程度以及企业员工对其企业安全管理人员胜任力的满意度。结果表明,安全管理人员的胜任力包括人际合作、创新运作、敬业专业、积极主动和过程导向等5方面;员工对企业安全管理人员在过程导向方面的表现比较满意,对其他胜任力的满意度一般;通过对安全管理人员胜任力的满意度与重要度的比较分析,发现员工认为安全管理人员的创新运作和敬业专业胜任力需要提高。     

Relation between senior managers’ safety leadership and safety behavior in the Chinese petrochemical industry

Senior managers in organizations are authorized and obliged to maintain organizational safety. However, to date, little research has considered the relation of senior managers' safety leadership to safety behavior. This study addresses this gap by using path analysis to confirm the validity of a hypothetical model that relates six dimensions of senior managers' safety leadership to two safety behaviors through the safety climate in the petrochemical industry. A questionnaire survey was sent randomly to workers (other than senior managers) in two petrochemical companies in China, and data from 155 usable responses were compiled for the path analysis. Results indicate that in the petrochemical industry, senior managers' safety leadership has a positive impact on safety behavior, and the safety climate plays an intermediary role between them. From the perspective of the dimensions of senior managers' safety leadership and safety behavior, safety concern has the greatest positive effect on safety compliance. Moreover, safety vision has the greatest positive impact on safety participation, whereas safety inspiration and safety awards and punishment have negative effects on safety compliance. Personal character does not directly influence any dimension of safety behavior but indirectly does so by influencing the safety climate. On the basis of these results, measures of improving senior managers' safety leadership in the petrochemical industry are presented to help improve the overall safety performance of the industry. A new view is provided for the petrochemical industry in China to suggest that senior managers’ safety leadership can be treated earnestly.     

Responses to accidents in different industrial sectors

Accidents produce external pressures on companies leading to new regulations and renegotiation of enforcement of regulations. Our perspective is institutional with a focus on the extended dialogue among regulators and the industry. The empirical focus is offshore oil and gas production, deep sea and coastal fisheries, and maritime transportation with a segment of older bulk carriers. The findings are that structural characteristics of both the industries and the regulatory regime determine the interactions between the regulated and the regulator. The paper illustrates that in industrial sectors where hazards and risks are visible and of public interest, it is easier to implement regulations through outside pressure from regulators and other stakeholders such as internationally organised unions.     

Investigating new risk reduction and mitigation in the oil and gas industry

The complexity of the processes and the nature of volatile petroleum products urged the oil and gas industry to utilize various risk assessment techniques to identify potential failure modes that can interrupt operation processes. Consequently, government agencies and nonprofit professional societies guide the industry with regulatory guidelines, standards, and best recommended practices to oversee the operations management, assure safe working environment, and contain failures within tolerable limits. Yet, accidents due to electro-mechanical failures still occur and result in various consequences. Accordingly, critics have raised concerns about the petroleum industry's safety and risk mitigation credentials and question its ability to prevent future major accidents. Therefore, new risk assessment tools need to be introduced to provide decision makers and novice engineers with a diverse perception of potential risks. The aim of this paper is verify the application of Risk in Early Design (RED), a product risk assessment tool, in identifying potential failures in the oil and gas industry. Approximately thirty major accident underwent the RED analysis to verify the software's application to identify and rank potential failure modes.     

Stock market responses to chemical accidents in Japan: An event study

Despite recent major chemical process accidents in Japan, the top management teams of firms still avoid taking costly risk reduction measures because of their low perceived impact on firm performance. The disclosure of information on accident risks might motivate managers to enhance workplace safety because of the subsequent evaluation of firms by investors in stock markets. If the disclosed risk information is newly available for investors, firms with a high risk of accidents would receive a poor evaluation by stock markets and thus managers would take risk reduction measures to prevent stock prices from declining. In this study, we conduct an event study analysis to examine whether accident risk information is already reflected in stock prices, using data on the Japanese chemical industry. The results of our event study show that the estimated cumulative average abnormal returns of firms' stocks are significantly negative after severe accidents actually occurred. This finding implies that risk information is not already reflected in the stock prices of Japanese chemical firms and that the disclosure of accident risk information has the potential to motivate the top management teams of firms to reduce their firms’ accident risk.     

The INDICATE safety program: evaluation of a method to proactively improve airline safety performance

A number of recent and highly publicised fatal aircraft accidents, within the Australian regional airline industry, has highlighted the need for operators of regular public transport aircraft to be more proactive in identifying and addressing aviation safety hazards. Despite this need, there are currently few proactive safety management programs that are practical, simple, cost effective and which reliably demonstrate improvements in airline safety performance. This paper outlines a new proactive airline safety program called INDICATE (Identifying Needed Defences In the Civil Aviation Transport Environment) that has been applied within the Australian regional airline industry. To evaluate the INDICATE program, a major Australian regional airline agreed to implement the program in one of its operational bases while another base was used as a control group. Five evaluation criteria were applied to determine whether the program would have a positive influence on the airline's safety performance. These criteria included airline safety culture, staff risk perception of aviation safety hazards, willingness of staff to report safety hazards, action taken on identified safety hazards and staff comments about safety management within the airline. Results from the trial suggest that the program can have a positive influence on airline safety performance, specifically: improving staff confidence in how safety is managed, increasing staff willingness to report safety hazards and incidents, improving organisational safety culture and reducing staff perceptions of the severity and likelihood of safety hazards occurring within the airline. The success of the trial has resulted in a number of Australian and International airlines adopting the program.