Process Safety Management

The Evolution of Safety: From People to Equipment

Traditionally, occupational safety focuses on personnel actions and injury prevention. However, process safety shifts the focus to the condition of the equipment itself. In his presentation, Sergey Ryabkin, Process Safety Manager at OMK, explains why managing technical risks and preventing accidents are just as important as controlling worker behavior. Using his company as an example, the speaker demonstrates how integrating these two areas forms a unified system aimed at achieving zero injuries.

The Three Pillars of Process Safety

The process safety management system at the enterprise is built on three key areas, which are discussed in detail in the webinar:

• Mechanical integrity of equipment. The goal is to maintain the safe condition of machinery throughout its entire lifecycle. This includes risk management during maintenance, control of purchased spare parts, and regular failure analysis.
• Management of technical changes. Any modification to equipment or processes must undergo a risk assessment. The speaker provides an example where simply replacing a forklift fender with an analog lacking wheel chock mounts led to an injury due to makeshift modifications.
• Pre-startup safety reviews. A tool for assessing equipment readiness for operation after repair or modernization. It helps avoid formal acceptance "on paper" and subsequent unplanned downtime.

Practical Tools: From Criticality to Digitalization

To implement these areas, the company has introduced a number of practical tools. The speaker breaks down the process of identifying critical equipment — out of the entire fleet, 1,360 units were identified whose failure would lead to process stoppage or severe consequences. A special card based on a 5x5 risk matrix was developed to assess their condition.

Special attention is given to digitalization. The management of technical changes is integrated into the corporate IT system, where any employee can initiate a change, and managers can conduct an initial risk assessment. This allows for the control of over 150 changes per month, moving away from paper red tape.

Pre-Startup Reviews: A Barrier Against Hazardous Equipment

The presentation details the mechanism of pre-startup reviews. An individual checklist is developed for each unit of critical equipment. If the commission identifies critical remarks (Category A, e.g., non-functioning interlocks), acceptance is halted until they are resolved. Category B remarks (not directly affecting safety) are recorded with deadlines for elimination. This approach is applied both after repairs and when accepting new equipment from contractors, strictly preventing attempts to hand over machinery with non-functioning safety systems.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to identify critical equipment and organize control of its mechanical integrity?
• Why replacing a part with an analog requires a risk assessment and how to organize this process?
• How to implement pre-startup reviews and force contractors to hand over only safe equipment?
• How to automate the tracking of technical initiatives and involve line managers in risk assessment?