Page 151 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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128 Serious Incident Prevention

Identify Key Identify Identify Establish Goals Track
Performance Actions and Progress and Performance
Areas Results Measures Reinforcement
Needed Milestones

FIGURE 12-1. Steps for implementing the safety performance index.

overall performance. My extensive experience with the type of matrix
shown in Figure 12-2 has been very favorable, and the performance index
has proven to be a very powerful tool. As illustrated, key progress measures
are listed in the first column of the matrix, the next ten columns are re-
served for documenting current and desired levels of performance for each
key measure, and the remaining four columns are used for recording actual
performance (Value), the performance level achieved (Level), the relative
weighting for each measure (Weight), and calculating a score based upon
the actual performance and weighting for each measure (Score).

Safety Performance Indexing—An Example

A simplified example will provide a better understanding of how the
matrix is developed. Let’s assume your organization has identified five key
performance areas, as listed below with a weighting factor that the imple-
mentation team has decided to assign to each area.

1. Leadership training for first-level supervisors: assigned a weighting
of 20

2. Audit scores for regulatory compliance: assigned a weighting of 15
3. Timeliness in addressing corrective actions to incident investigations
and hazards analyses: assigned a weighting of 20
4. Annual volume of hazardous materials spills: assigned a weighting
of 25
5. Recordable injury rate: assigned a weighting of 20

(Note that the sum of the weighting factors must equal 100; in this case
20 + 15 + 20 + 25 + 20 = 100.)
A first step in developing the matrix is to record the key performance
areas to be measured and the weightings for each area in the matrix as
shown by Figure 12-3. A next step is to identify the current level of per-
formance and both realistic improvement goals and more visionary “stretch
goals” for each progress measure. Improvement goals are those that the or-