Process Safety Management Quality in Industrial Corporation for Sustainable Development

In recent years, also in connection with Covid-19 pandemics and enforced restrictions, there has been the formation of large industrial corporations gathering separate companies with similar, sometimes complementary production profiles. This evolving trend has brought usually positive economic effects; however, it has also created some integration problems that include the process safety management. The Texas City BP accident in 2005 and its tremendous human and economic losses underlined the obstacles in defining a well-structured corporation process safety management. The main causes of the above-mentioned accident were connected to an inadequate safety culture at the managerial level. Strong leadership and high standards of corporate governance are required to inspire correct safety behavior in the staff. The so-called soft skills become even more important in the Industry 4.0 arena, where the foundation of the whole system is based on an intelligent use and interpretation of data. The importance of this aspect is confirmed by several post-accidental analyses of past events. Although some research on this topic has been already done, it is worth it to dedicate some effort to identifying specific factors which influence the corporate process safety management quality, and, once identified, to assess them. This paper applies the concept of “lessons learnt” for the identification of organizational and managerial aspects worth consideration in process safety management. Based on accident and literature reviews and expert opinions, the aim is to identify the major contributing factors among leadership and safety culture, risk awareness, knowledge and competence, communication, and information and decision-making processes. To self-assess the level of commitment of the top leaders in process safety management, a checklist approach is proposed, combined with a quantitative, weighted evaluation based on the Relative Efficiency Indicator (REI). Positive value of REI may ensure the effectiveness of process safety management in major hazard industries and their appropriate adaptation to the corporation community. The proposed method, which is validated in an actual case study, underlines the importance of an appropriate education, and of a more careful selection of HSE managers.