The past four decades in the chemical process industry have seen several watershed incidents which have been a source of many lessons for process safety and risk management. An important area of concern and debate is the role played by ‘human error’ as a cause of these incidents. Recent emphasis on the importance of the ‘softer’ factors of safety including human factors such as fatigue, stress, cognition etc. have attempted to demystify ‘human error’ by providing opportunities for improvement by offering systematic tools and framework to analyze systems to reduce the chance of these errors. A keen focus of this is Procedures; operating and non-routine procedures play an important role in daily operations both as a preventive and mitigative barrier in case of abnormal situations.
The Search for Simplicity in Procedures
All domestic commercial nuclear power plants use paper procedures. We use procedures for administrative, operating and maintenance, basically whenever we need a step-by-step method to get from point A to point B. There are probably nearly one thousand of them at every station.
While we have a structured system of creating and modifying paper procedures, there are several inefficient and ineffective downsides. Over time these procedures have mutated to have many steps that the craft have to migrate through like lawyers.
Welcome to the Procedure Paradigm
We believe in pushing the envelope to provide the absolute best procedure to employees at the time they need it. You'll hear our thoughts as industry leaders in this space as well as thoughts and experience of other notable pioneers. Ultimately, Next Generation procedures should enable every employee to go home with all of their body parts which requires a shift in the paradigm of procedures.
In our first post, Nate Rightmer shares thoughts on the human error conundrum, how compliance is failing, and a view of the procedure paradigm.