A Study on the Development of Safety Performance Index in Chemical Industry

In order to maintain the continual safety management in a company, it needs to evaluate and monitor its implementation of safety management. Because the number of major-accidents is not an effective method of indicating company's safety performance, various efforts to develop more reasonable indicators have been made in world wide. After Korean government has legally required the PSM report, PSM compliance audit has been developed and made by the authorities concerned since 2005. However, this audit consists of complicate procedures difficult to utilize as com- panies' own audit program and corresponds to only a conformity check that confirms whether the PSM be operated and maintained properly. So a new index by which to measure easily the level of safety performance and self-monitor the implementation of safety management is needed. We have studied a new method that may quantitatively evaluate the performance of safety management by investigating application cases in foreign countries and doing the domestic survey of lots of companies subject to PSM regulation in Korea. This study proposes three of safety performance indices(SPI) together with the several prerequisite preconditions and the timing for application of each index. Although the first draft of SPI needs further legal support, it might help to evaluate every company's safety level. The second draft of SPI is a voluntarily evaluating method based on web-site online program. The last draft of SPI consists of a series of simple questions about 12 elements of PSM. Also each of 3 indices has differences in evaluation methodology and application area and, therefore, they may be used concurrently.