As DuPont said many years ago, “If you can manage safety, you can manage anything.” But how do you make absolutely sure that everyone goes that extra mile when it comes to safety? How do you make sure that people behave safely? And, last but not least, how do you measure where you are now and where you want to be in the future?

Key performance indicators
KPIs, as they are known, are widely used to measure the safety performance of manufacturing plants. A quick round of industry players provides some idea of the kind of things they are used to monitor. Items mentioned include obvious indicators – the number of incidents, near-incidents, hazardous situations and so on – but also more indirect factors like counts of inspection rounds and emergency drills, how frequently alarms sound and how many safety action items are completed on time. And this is just a small selection.

Lagging and leading indicators
In practice, most KPIs in use are so-called “lagging indicators”. This means that they say something about the past. Or, to put it another way, they provide a picture of how you have already performed. Nowadays, though, the use of “leading indicators” in on the increase. These are forward-looking, and so help you to tell whether you are on the right path – or to warn you if you are not. As such, they enable you to adjust processes whilst they are still under way and to respond to safety issues proactively rather than reactively. The use of both types of indicator is a good sign, but which are most helpful in improving your safety performance on a constant basis?

Points for improvement
A good question to start with is: how can you achieve the greatest reduction in the number of incidents? Possible answers might include improving safety awareness, improving those work processes specifically designed to prevent incidents or a combination of the two. The second step is to determine which KPIs are most closely associated with continuous performance improvement. You do this by looking at the intended end result of a process and at those aspects of that process which could be done better.

The purpose of a process is to ensure that changes do not lead to either incidents or loss of production. The associated lagging indicators are the number of HSE incidents caused by change and the amount of production lost as a result of it. To identify the relevant leading indicators, we need to find factors that we can influence and measure. This task can be approached from a theoretical perspective, but it is far better to look at what is actually going wrong within the process. Going wrong because, for example, people are not submitting requests for changes, are not conducting effective change risk analyses, do not take the measures resulting from such analyses or are not informed that a change is under way, thus exposing them to danger. In short, in practice there are dozens of ways in which safety at a manufacturing plant can be compromised. Once you have itemised what can go wrong, you can define relevant KPIs. For instance, for the list just given these would be: the number of changes for which requests were and were not submitted; the number of submitted requests which prompted a change risk analysis; the number of resulting measures or actions still not taken after, say, three months; and the number of people notified of or instructed about the change in question.

On the work floor
To start with, check your key “lines of defence”. Go out onto the work floor and actually talk to your supervisors and operators. And listen to what they have to say. Not only are they the people best placed to know where improvements can be made, because they work with the process every day, but by interacting with them you are involving them in the changes. At the same time, use your own “gut feeling” to consider what you could be better at.

Defining KPIs
Let’s take the permit to work process. What do you look at when determining that a permit is in order? Or, to put another way, what are the KPIs in this process? Here are a number of possibilities: How clearly is the task described? What does it actually involve? Has a good risk analysis been conducted? Have all the risks present been identified and, above all, does the analysis truly reflect the situation on the ground? Have all the appropriate people seen the permit? How good is the handover? Is the work carried out correctly? And are all the right measures taken? The last three points can be checked by taking random samples.

A leap forward
KPIs are subject to change. You need to adjust them constantly to the current situation. Once an improvement has been achieved, you can select a replacement indicator. Rather than the greatest outstanding risk, this might address some other factor,for instance, the greatest annoyance. An example from one of our clients illustrates this. Staff at its plant is not permitted to wear any jewellery at work, and the great majority of them consider it very important that everyone sticks to that rule. They were very pleased, then, when a system was introduced that allows them to report breaches of it. As a result, the regulation is now taken far more seriously. It is clear that a great leap forward has been achieved. Another good idea is to introduce themes into the safety programme, and to present them in such a way that they appeal to the workforce. Remember that defining KPIs can be viewed as threatening: “Big Brother is watching you”.

Step by step
Once you have identified all the important points requiring attention, avoid tackling everything at the same time. That just causes fragmentation. Instead, choose one item to start with and set the others aside for the time being. Only turn to them once the first issue is dealt with. If and when a matter is no more than difference of opinion, make a decision either way and move on to the next point. And stop measuring a KPI once you have achieved the associated objective, because you now mastered that issue. You are far better off concentrating your efforts upon something else. However small, every improvement counts as a step along the road towards maximum safety.

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