Pre-Startup Safety Review (PSSR)
Restarting an industrial facility after a shutdown or a major change
During the corona virus crisis, many industrial facilities are either shutting down, having been deemed non-essential, or converting in order to manufacture products whose demand has skyrocketed.
Perhaps the best example is the many process industries modifying their plants to produce disinfection fluids.
Organizational Process Safety (OPS)
Whether shutting down, restarting or converting, a change management plan can determine an organization’s success. Management of change (MOC) is one of the twenty pillars of Organizational Process Safety (OPS), DEKRA’s risk-based process safety management model informed by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). OPS embeds both technical and organizational aspects of process safety, since we at DEKRA believe that organizational elements are the “glue” that holds together the technical elements.
Poor, insufficient or non-existent management of change is one of the root causes commonly mentioned in incident investigations. It is also one of the root causes behind of many infamous incidents, infamous for causing a large number of fatalities and significant economic losses.
Pre-startup safety review (PSSR)
Major changes, then, such as revamping an industrial facility, reverting to its original process afterwards, or restarting it after a shutdown need to be managed well in order to minimize process safety risks.
One of the fundamental tools for managing change is the Pre-Startup Safety Review (PSSR). A PSSR consists of a checklist of items to be thoroughly verified before a process begins or restarts in order to ensure that potential hazards have been properly addressed. Creating such a list is a critical step, since any hazard not included will be properly mitigated. In this case, clearly, one size does not fit all!
The DEKRA team has many experts on board with experience in assessing process safety hazards and risks, and in supporting our clients in the development of PSSRs fine-tuned to their processes and plants.
Why DEKRA?
- We are experts in Organizational Process Safety.
- We have the resources to accommodate your process safety needs and requests, even remotely.
- We specialize in developing PSSRs and have shared this expertise to benefit many of our clients.