Herman Van Roost, General Manager Industrial Organization and Competences Project, Total Petrochemicals recently presented this paper at the Safety Culture Management conference in Prague. "The Need for Excellence in Safe Operations to Manage High Risk Plants" discusses why, with so much emphasis on process safety, the problem continues to get worse. He shares his thoughts on how the required competency to operate plants is increasing at the same time the complexity of the operation is also increasing. Mr. Van Roost shares a case study and how the initial finding led to "human error" as the problem, but subsequent analysis found that the incident occurred due to lack of adapted formalism and coherent supervision & coordination for complex operations like unit start-up. The ASM Consortium finds this paper and discussion in line with our thinking on managing abnormal situations and would like to thank Mr. Van Roost for allowing us to post his paper on our site.

Gain a better understanding of the contents of the ASM Consortium Guidelines: Effective Operator Display Design, including: The sixteen guideline categories (from display content to display layout to use of color to alarm annunciation to management of change) and Specific design guidelines to address to avoid significant pitfalls. PDF of the slides and the Recording are both available for viewing.

The ASM Consortium Guidelines for Effective Alarm Management Practices (ISBN: 987-1442184251) are available for purchase at Createspace.com at the link below, or from Amazon. These guidelines can be used to assess the quality of a company's alarm management practices and develop an improvement plan.