Development and application of process safety competency framework in agroindustry: A case study

Abstract

Events in industries have shown that a lack of process safety culture has an important contribution in driving the site to fail. The culture is composed of the values, competencies, and attitudes that drive the organization to success. Thus, competency is a core step in developing a proper foundation to implement process safety management (PSM). In the food industry, the competencies related to process safety are not as well developed as in other types of industries. Although the industry has several information and training programs on process safety, such information needs to be organized into a framework to better direct people and assure standardization and sustainment. This case study presents the proposal for a process safety competency framework with the goal to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for people at different levels in the organization to be successful in managing hazards. The competencies are defined in a way to make the contents assertive with the roles and levels of expertise also using the 70%, 20%, 10% methodology of learning and andragogy. As an initial result of this work, we could verify an increase in the leading process safety event registration, which shows an increase of awareness and culture.