Many organizations struggle to identify “safety metrics” besides their lagging indicators. But the PRCS article I posted Friday night contains at least a dozen metrics around our PRCS safety management efforts. There are a lot of “SIF salespersons” out there selling their “SIF approach.” On the other end of the SMS spectrum are the facilities deep into SIF; they just may not use fancy terminology and all the parading.
I grew up in the chemical industry, and as I have said before, process safety is a SIF approach to managing safety (vs. the OSH models) – giving LOW FREQUENCY/HIGH SEVERITY events much-needed attention. But as the great Todd Conklin recently said…
“Safety is not the absence of events; safety is the presence of defenses.”
My SMS approach to managing the HIGH RISK associated with Permit-Required Confined Spaces (PRCS) reflects this comment. From how we perform the initial evaluations to our auditing of the program, it is ALL ABOUT ensuring the work within the SMS is of good quality, done by competent personnel, and audited by a 2nd/3rd party to verify and validate the efforts.
Having a written program to make OSHA happy is a far cry from what needs to be done in a very FORMAL, STRUCTURED, and VISUAL manner. Complying with 1910.146 or 1926.1201-.1213 is simply compliance; it is not a management system approach or a SIF approach, and thus, that compliance approach will get us the results we’ve earned.
It is time to move beyond OSHA compliance and begin to address our HIGH-RISK tasks in the eyes of an SMS built around the SIF approach. I suggest starting with either LOTO or Confined Spaces and seeing how these two are connected; if you’re excited about taking this next step, do both programs simultaneously. And I promise you will recognize dozens of new metrics that MAKE A DIFFERENCE in the safety of the men and women doing these HIGH-RISK tasks. Those metrics will VERIFY and VALIDATE that the controls/safeguards associated with these tasks are in place and functioning as designed, and that is what SIF and SMS are all about.
