(46c) Recommendations and the Broken KPI

Operating company metrics and CCPS Industry Surveys show that the “Number of PHA Recommendations Completed” is considered a “New Leading Indicator” for process safety. This focuses companies on quantity and not recommendation impact.

We can improve our current practices and ensure we implement the “most valuable recommendations” instead of “as many recommendations as we can”.

3 key elements which encourage a change of focus from Quantity to Quality, and in turn helps workers be more aware of minimizing risk and financial opportunity costs, are:

• Determine an indicator which represents value of recommendations.
• Determine the ideal order of implementing recommendations.
• Compare actual implementation to ideal implementation then close gaps by analyzing the difference.

The benefit of a recommendation is the risk reduction it provides to consequences. By looking at aspects of the recommendation that include its projected reliability, and the severity and frequency of scenarios it would protect against, we can calculate the value of recommendations and rank them by their initial benefit.

By knowing our most risk reducing recommendation, we can simulate what would happen to our risk if we were to implement it. For example, “Now that Recommendation X is a safeguard, how has the importance of our other recommendations changed?” What happens to our risk ranking if we were to implement the next most important recommendation? Using an iterative methodology, we can determine the ideal order of implementation and provide a useful target to strive toward.