Page 150 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

CH12pp126-140 4/10/02 12:51 PM Page 127

Measurement and Feedback—Safety Performance Indexing 127

Frequency and severity of incidents:

Injuries
Property damage and business interruption
Hazardous material releases
Regulatory agency violations
Other

With such a large number of parameters to consider in evaluating the
success or failure of the safety mission, how can managers know if the or-
ganization’s progress is in the right direction? Utilization of the safety per-
formance indexing technique will often be the best solution for providing
this information. Safety performance indexing provides an effective method
for measuring, tracking, and graphically displaying safety performance.
Safety performance indexing can help the organization to:

Focus on proactive, preventive measures rather than on measurement
of after-the-fact indicators
Monitor several key measures on an ongoing basis
Establish appropriate improvement goals and reinforcement mile-
stones
Quantify progress in improving safety
Focus the organization’s resources on the highest priority safety ini-
tiatives
Provide an equitable comparison of safety performance among dif-
ferent organizations. 1

Establishing a Safety Performance Index
for Prevention of Serious Incidents

The process for implementing the safety performance index is illus-
trated by Figure 12-1. Steps in the process include identifying key per-
formance areas, identifying critical work and results needed to improve
performance in each key performance area, identifying progress measures,
establishing goals and reinforcement milestones, and tracking performance.
There are several variations of the safety performance index, but each
method typically utilizes a matrix that provides the capability for weighting
the relative importance of each key performance area and for quantifying