EHS and Process Safety Management is widely credited for reductions in major accident risk and has enhanced the process industry performance. Process safety practices and formal safety management systems have been in place in some companies for many years. Over the past two decades, government mandates for formal process safety management systems globally,and have prompted widespread implementation of a management systems approach to process safety management.

However, after an initial surge of activity, process safety management activities appear to have stagnated within many organizations. Incident investigations continue to identify inadequate management system performance as a key contributor to the incident. moreover audits reveal a history of repeat findings indicating chronic problems whose symptoms are fixed time and again without effectively addressing the technical and cultural root causes.

While all of these issues may not have occurred in your organisation but, they have all happened to some degree in other companies. Left unchecked, such issues can do more than cause stagnation.They can leave organizations susceptible to losing their focus on process safety, resulting in a serious decline in process safety performance or a loss of emphasis on achieving process safety excellence. This is one of the reasons the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) created the next generation process safety management framework – Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS).