Organizational Process Safety

Risk-Based Process Safety: An Enhanced Approach to Risk Management

High hazard industries have long invested in process safety management systems. As consumers and the public increasingly scrutinize the safety practices of companies of all sizes, interest in Process Safety (PS) has grown. A new approach is to use the principles of High Reliability Organizations (HROs) to transform your process safety system.

Conventional PS management, often compliance-oriented and dictated by regulatory bodies such as OSHA or Seveso, has not prevented disasters from happening. Traditional audits, while appropriate for evaluating a program against a given standard, fail to address organizations’ capability and culture, which are critical in determining process safety outcomes.

Organizational Process Safety (OPS) is DEKRA’s answer to the call for innovative solutions to persistent process safety challenges and a more effective process safety management system. Drawing on decades of experience with partners in the oil, gas, pharmaceutical, and chemical sectors, our experts have designed a ground-breaking approach to risk-based process safety that incorporates organizational culture and capability, as well as human factors. The approach is based on the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) risk-based process safety model and utilizes the critical areas identified by the best-in-class tool. The result is a flexible, scalable approach that is applicable to any industry. Our process generates reproducible results, customized recommendations, and a roadmap for improvement. OPS goes beyond compliance and existing process safety systems to help your team create a High Reliability Organization (HRO).

DEKRA's Organizational Process Safety Framework

Your Benefits

An objective, scalable, precise, and reproducible measure of the maturity level of your site or organization.
Optimal interventions to improve your organization’s maturity level, and benchmarking indicators to monitor this progress.
The ability to conduct meaningful benchmarking across your sites and geographical areas, with an assessment tool that has all the features of a reliable metric.
An expert assessment of both the capabilities and culture underpinning your organization’s risk management program carried out efficiently with your resources and personnel.
A roadmap to optimizing process safety management in your organization.

Our Approach

We structure our OPS service around Risk-Based Process Safety, a continuous improvement method that involves a cycle of assessment, improvement implementation, and monitoring. OPS is our distinct and pragmatic approach to Process Safety Management with tools that specifically address an organization’s capabilities and culture.

True to our values and role as trusted advisors, we listen carefully to to ensure that our approach is adapted to your needs. A general outline of the process:

Discussion: Together we meet to determine the scope of the service, identifying the areas of the organization and workstreams to be assessed.
Targeted assessment: Specialists familiar with your technology perform assessments that determine the PS maturity level within each identified workstream, and each receives a benchmark score for future monitoring.
Prioritization and recommendations: Assessment results are prioritized so that weaker areas are addressed more urgently than relatively strong ones; interventions are proposed that promote maturity progress.
Implementation support: Specialists are available in this optional stage to assist with the implementation of interventions.
Reassessment: Within five years, an organization can request a follow-up assessment to measure progress and redirect efforts.

Our targeted assessment precisely measures and evaluates an organization’s maturity in OPS. The result identifies whether your site has an avoidance-, compliance-, or values-driven culture.

Why DEKRA?

DEKRA’s Organizational Process Safety consulting services enables leadership to understand and address the underlying factors that contribute to catastrophic safety risk, uncover organizational blind spots, and identify cultural and leadership factors that contribute to effective exposure control.

As a starting point, DEKRA assesses the critical factors that influence the level of organizational risk, effectiveness of risk mitigation, and sustainability of exposure control. The assessment results allow leadership to identify targeted solutions that address the most impactful issues facing your organization.

DEKRA’s approach combines our world-renowned technical expertise in Process Safety with industry-leading scientific perspectives on Organizational Safety and Reliability. DEKRA provides a comprehensive solution set and organizational change model with a focus on culture change, governance, leadership development, employee participation, and risk control systems. We work with your team to understand why early warning signals are overlooked and what can be done to improve identification and response.

We also work with you to build a Learning Organization where risks are systematically identified, controls sustainably implemented, and performance is monitored in order to develop the attributes of a HRO and reduce the potential for catastrophic incidents.