This recommended practice identifies leading and lagging process safety indicators useful for driving performance improvement. As a framework for measuring activity, status, or performance, this document classifies process safety indicators into four tiers of leading and lagging indicators. Tiers 1 and 2 are suitable for nationwide public reporting and Tiers 3 and 4 are intended for internal use at individual facilities. Guidance on methods for development and
use of performance indicators is also provided.
This RP was developed for the refining and petrochemical industries, but may also be applicable to other industries with operating systems and processes where loss of containment has the potential to cause harm. Applicability is not limited to those facilities covered by the OSHA Process Safety Management Standard, 29 CFR 1910.119, or similar national and international regulations.
To enable consistent application of this RP to other refining and petrochemical industry sub-segments, informative annexes have been created to define the applicability and process definition for those subsegments. The user would substitute the content of those annexes for the referenced sections of this RP: Annex A (Petroleum Pipeline and Terminal Operation), Annex B (Retail Service Stations), and Annex C (Oil and Gas Drilling and Production Operations).
Performance indicators identified in this recommended practice are based on the following guiding principles.
-Indicators should drive process safety performance improvement and learning.
-Indicators should be relatively easy to implement and easily understood by all stakeholders (e.g., workers and the public).
-Indicators should be statistically valid at one or more of the following levels: industry, company, and facility. Statistical validity requires a consistent definition, a minimum data set size, a normalization factor, and a relatively consistent reporting pool.
-Indicators should be appropriate for industry-, company-, or facility level benchmarking.