Safety

Risk-Management Tool Addresses Cultural Factors To Improve Safety

New methodology addresses underlying issues to achieve more-sustainable process-safety and HSE performance.

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ABS Group introduced a new analysis methodology at the 2019 Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS). Cultural Cause Analysis (CCA) is a next-generation root-cause analysis (RCA) methodology and risk-management tool that maps process-safety incidents in order to mitigate cultural hazards.

ABS developed the CCA methodology over 10 years, evaluating data insights that identify the leading cultural factors that have contributed to major incidents and benchmarking the approach to more than a dozen culture assessment models. This new approach leverages 45 years of incident-investigation, RCA, and process-safety-management (PSM) expertise.

“Organizations struggle to achieve ‘drive to zero’ safety objectives,” said Ryan Moody, ABS Group president and chief executive officer. “Our safety and risk experts have spent over a decade researching data-driven ways to close this gap, recognizing that RCA alone is not enough. We must also adapt our work processes to address the cultural factors that can negatively affect organizational performance.”

As an advanced risk-management tool, CCA will allow organizations to create lasting changes that promote sustainable, outstanding performance in safety leadership.

“CCA is an important breakthrough,” said Steve Arendt, ABS Group vice president of oil, gas and chemical services and the 2019 recipient of the Norton H. Walton/Russell L. Miller Award in Safety/Loss Prevention presented by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. “This method can be used as part of a proactive culture evaluation or following a process-safety event to understand the culture disease pathology that may be affecting a company and how best to return to good process-safety health.”

Read more about the CCA here (PDF).