How to keep BOS alive ?

By XX SAFEX Congress BOS Application Training Group

Often, if we don’t pay enough attention and act, organizations tend to lose their corporate memories. Just like choosing paths blindfolded or trying to win a race when you're stuck in the mud, losing your company's memory will result in losing all the advantages you've built over time to make better decisions. At the same time, there may be a price to pay, as your business can't function without that crucial piece of knowledge that's missing. When it comes to BOS, we will be missing the opportunity of preventing catastrophic events in our industry, saving many lives, avoiding life-changing injuries to our colleagues and at the same time compromising business continuity.

During the XX SAFEX Congress in Salzburg, the BOS Application Training Group had the challenge to work, during one of the sessions, on reflecting and defining ways of keeping BOS alive within our organizations.

This article summarizes many of the interesting point that were revised and discussed as a group to ensure that BOS keeps alive within our organizations.

• BOS as a value: BOS should be part of the Company Safety Policy, Leadership should be based on BOS, showing commitment to it, making it visible constantly, and be accessible easily to everyone. Constantly talk about BOS, at all levels of the organization.
• BOS as a formal program: A formal program should be defined from the top of the company. A responsible person must be assigned for defining, establishing how to start, what to do and how to do follow up. Don’t forget a succession plan! This program should also include a way of validating the implementation and ensuring the safety competence of operators. Implementing License to Operate will help on this. This is an Austin Powder hands-on experience that contributes both, to maintain people's knowledge level and plant compliance, as well as keeping the BOS program alive.
• BOS as a continue learning process: Always update your BOS system with fresh information: encourage reporting and investigate incidents and near misses, review lessons learned from process related incident investigations, include all the hazardous scenarios detected during Hazard Studies of new equipment and Technologies and take advantage of the information from incidents shared by SAFEX. Make good use of your own experts for mentoring and pass on the relevant information. Remember SAFEX has a very useful eLearning module on BOS available.
• BOS as an ongoing development: Always challenge the status quo. Look for new and alternatives ways of keeping people involved and hooked up. Make use of new tools as digitalization and competitions. Make it educational, often use demonstration and clear examples. Understand who your audience is, what it the best way to get to them. Local Language information is very important.
• Evaluate performance and Celebrate achievements: Set goals and monitor performance regularly. A BOS Scorecard system is a great tool to do this. It can bring information into a single report, which can save time, and resources. It also allows companies to track their performance very easily. And always remember to recognize the actions of the whole team that contributed to reaching the results. Recognition reinforces the safe behaviors that drive continuous improvement and motivates people to get involved in the safety effort.

It is now up to all of us to make sure we continuously use this great tool available in the industry to operate in a safe and consistent manner, always.