Performance indicators for monitoring safety management systems in chemical industry

The development of the Safety Management System (SMS) in chemical industry appears as one of the important requirements introduced by the EU "Seveso II" Directive on the control of major-accident hazards. This paper aims to provide a contribution regarding the SMS structure and the definition of the tools for assessing the effectiveness of this system by means of safety performance indicators. The performance indicators are linked to a reference values or policy targets, illustrating how far the SMS is from the desired level. We developed a system of performance indicators for SMS in chemical industry by using the concept of environmental performance indicators defined in standard ISO 14031. A set of three types of safety system performance indicators was proposed: management performance indicators, operational performance indicators and safety status indicators. These indicators represent the most important factors in the linkage between a possible cause of an accident and its effects.