Do Incident Data & Lessons Learned Really Facilitate Process Improvement?

Regulations are a set of guidelines for the industry for protecting the people and environment, when it comes to process safety systems. While some companies tend to find that complying with regulatory requirements are always a challenge, on the other hand some tend to go overboard in their bid to stay compliant. In spite of the route taken, there are incidents – major, minor and near misses.

Other than the accumulation of this data, the investigations also result in lessons learned. Over the past four decades, lot of incident data and lessons learned has accumulated, been assimilated, and also analyzed. Complementing that are the audits, system reviews, hazard identification exercises, changes to regulations, and knowledge sharing forums.

It is a very efficient and effective mechanism to leverage these vast sources of current information developed, and implement its learnings, in the operations of existing processes. While the core concepts of safety are universal across the various industrial sectors, its application may differ. But once again, the lessons learned databases are effective sources of making this leveraging process more efficient.

This paper will discuss the some case studies of how the concept of lessons learned and the knowledge of the incident data has been leveraged by the authors in various manners ensuring success from one industry to another – example (1) Learnings from an incident due to gaps in the Emergency Response Plan, bringing about success at another chemical manufacturing site; (2) Incident data from a steel plant, when analyzed and applied to a chemical plant resulted in improved of effectiveness.