TABLE OF CONTENTS "No single measure can meet all of these properties (efficient, understandable, practicable, can be integrated into normal operational activities and promotes involvement), but it is useful to at least know what one should look for in a search of improved measures of safety performance "
W E Tarrants, 1980
It has been recognised, especially after the Piper Alpha disaster that "... safety is crucially dependent on management and management systems" (Lord Cullen 1990). When we have a Safety Management System (SMS), we should be able to measure its performance. Two basic questions arise:
By what standards are we to assure that the integrity of a process facility is maintained through its life cycle?
How do we know that we are actually achieving the standards in practice?
Defining safety critical activities and setting performance standards for these activities provides the answer to the first question. Regular auditing of the SMS and comparing the audit findings against the performance standards answers the second question.
In this chapter, we shall describe how performance standards can be set, and review the principles and methods of auditing process safety management systems.
In Chapter 11, we have seen that SMS functions require an interface with the auditing component at all stages of SMS development, implementation, and monitoring. In fact without effective auditing, and monitoring the key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate the health of the system, one would never know how effective the SMS is,...
