Invest in safety or invest in production: a dilemma?
conference paper
A major problem within the area of industrial safety is justifying additional investment in safety. Why should managers invest in safety if not enforced by law or demanded by insurance companies? Since the industrialization, several aspects of industrial safety are under investigation and applied in industry. But why invest in safety instead of investing in, for example, production resources? Effects of additional production investments are intuitively certain but the effects of additional safety investments are not. This paper concerns the difference in appeal between safety issues and the primary operational process. This difference makes a potential investment in primary operations appearing to be a more reliable investment, in terms of yield improvement, that justifies a preference for operational investments above safety investments. In this paper the relation between `yield-from-operation' and `safety performance' is discussed, leading to a better understanding that process-performance improvement and safety management are closely interconnected through the concept of controlling the business process. Both, process performance as well as safety management strive for maximum availability of production facilities and for minimum 'recovery' -efforts and both can be satisfied if the operational business process is adequately under control. Investing in safety as well as investments in primary operation doesn't have to be a choice as improvement of control is the real target for investments.
TNO Identifier
256463
Publisher
TNO
Source title
CCPS International Conference and Workshop: "Making process safety pay, the business case", Toronto, ON, Canada, 2-5 October 2001
Collation
11 p.
Files
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