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Plan Ahead: Lean safety means managing risks at all shutdown stages |
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Written by Joel Levitt
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Lean safety is safety that is effective and adds the least possible overhead to the job. There is an overriding rule that the safest environment is one where safety is involved at all stages of the job - starting with conception and planning. Interestingly, that is also the way to deliver Lean safety. Tacked-on safety is fatter than planned-in safety.
I want to address how to bring safety to your shutdowns at the planning stage.
Risk management (and, in particular, risk identification) is best done as a team. The reason is that people from different backgrounds will see different potential hazards. Adding the input of millwrights, riggers, operators, engineers as well as safety people to the risk equation can only make it stronger.
 The planner breaks jobs down into steps. This process helps identify resources and makes it easier to estimate. One other process made easier by work breakdown is identification of hazards. See Figure 1 - a job to remove and replace a large horizontally mounted pump - as an example.
Risk Management
The three steps in the planning process are risk identification, risk quantification and risk response. The first two are sometimes grouped together under risk analysis or risk assessment.
1. Risk identification: Is there a risk here? Address both internal (under the team’s control) and external (outside world) risks.
2. Risk quantification: How much money will the event cost? How much time will it delay the completion? What is the likelihood of the risky event happening? How many people will get hurt and how hurt will they get?
3. Risk response: What is the response? How costly is it to respond? How likely will the response eliminate the risk? Can we transfer the risk to someone else (like fixed-price contracts or insurance)? Does the response introduce any unanticipated risk?
Once underway, employ risk vigilance. Ask yourself, “How do we organize our team so that when a risk becomes apparent we find out so we have enough time to respond?” In addition to vigilance, respond to changes in the character of the risks over the span of the project.
 A reference hazard table is a list of all known hazards at this (or any) site. There are always three options to deal with risk: to accept it and do nothing; to remove or eliminate the risk; and to mitigate the risk. In Figure 2, there is an example of two of the three options for each hazard.
Job safety analysis (JSA) is the process we use to detect hazards and decide what to do with them. The purpose of a JSA is to ensure that the risk of each step of a task is reduced to ALARP (as low as reasonably practicable). Examine each step and see if any of the hazards from the list are likely, probable or possible (high, medium or low probability).
 If we take just a few steps from the job plan, as in Figure 3, we can see what risks are present and based on the impact and probability of occurrence we can decide on a course of action.
It is Lean to run a shutdown without killing or hurting someone. Think ahead: safety is less expensive if it is planned into the job rather than tacked on afterward.
So now go forth and have safe shutdowns.
Joel Levitt is president of U.S.-based Springfield Resources. You can reach him by email at
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