on Risk & Safety

Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

The term “deadline” hasn’t been around that long, about 160 years in fact.  The first written mentions were in 1863 during the American Civil War.  The “dead-line”, as then, was defined as “a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot” and shot dead at that.  Prison conditions could be so deplorable that some men crossed the line on purpose, some survivors wrote that they had wished they’d crossed it to end their misery.  Deadlines in those days were lessons in ultimate liability.

Guest Post by Bill Pomfret (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Investigations of industrial accidents have found that a large number occurred during an interruption of production while an operator was trying to maintain or restart production. In each case the dangerous situation was created by a desire to save time and ease operations. In each case, the company’s safety rules were violated.

The best and most redundant safety layers can be defeated by poor or conflicting management practices. Numerous examples have been documented in the chemical industry. One accident in a polymer processing plant occurred after operations bypassed all alarms and interlocks to increase production by 5%. In another, interlocks and alarms failed—at a normal rate—but this was not known because management had decided to eliminate regular maintenance checks of the safety instrumentation.

Guest Post by Peter Holtmann (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

This article is the tenth of fourteen parts to our risk management series. The series will be taking a look at the risk management guidelines under the ISO 31000 Standard to help you better understand them and how they relate to your own risk management activities. In doing so, we’ll be walking through the core aspects of the Standard and giving you practical guidance on how to implement it.

Guest Post by Patrick Ow (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Smaller organisations, especially those with less than 100 people, often struggle with putting in place the right-size effective risk management practices that do not take up too much of their time and resources.

What I have often seen and experienced is that small-size organisations implement the ‘standard’ risk management practices that are commonly found in larger organisations without much thought as to whether it is fit-for-purpose to enable better organisational performance given their unique context or operating environment.

Guest Post by Peter Holtmann (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

This article is the ninth of fourteen parts to our risk management series. The series will be taking a look at the risk management guidelines under the ISO 31000 Standard to help you better understand them and how they relate to your own risk management activities. In doing so, we’ll be walking through the core aspects of the Standard and giving you practical guidance on how to implement it.

[Read more…]

Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

“Water water everywhere, not a drop to drink” is the modern and well-known phraseology from the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”.  In essence this means that despite being surrounded by an abundance of something one cannot benefit from it.

In today’s Information Age we are surrounded by data.  It’s everywhere and often available at the touch of a button, or rather a screen.  Instant and easy access is demanded but despite computers and the internet the right data is not always so easily or readily found.  Data, and the right data is an essential ingredient for decision making.

Guest Post by Bill Pomfret (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Just how safe is “safe”? Should working in a chemical plant have the same level of risk as skydiving (which kills about 40 people per year in the U.S.A Should working in a plant be as safe as driving your car? Or should it be as safe as flying in a plane, which is safer than driving a car by two orders of magnitude?

While the term FAR may be simple to understand and may represent a useful yardstick, many companies, especially in the U.S., are unwilling to put such targets in writing. Imagine walking into company XYZ’s plush world headquarters office and on the wall in the reception area is a sign that reads, “We at XYZ consider it tolerable to kill 4 people per 100-million-man hours.” The lawyers would have a field day! However, as we shall see, some organizations have established such quantified risk targets.