“Process industry has changed enormously over the years. Distance control as seen in a highly industrial environment as Corus has replaced the old fashioned ‘hands on control’.

Corus is proud to be one of the world’s safest companies in terms of process control and occupational safety. But incidents or incidents mounting up to accidents can never fully be excluded.”

So explained by Ruud Vellinga, process safety specialist at one of the most leading industrial plants worldwide, Corus located at Ymuiden, the Netherlands.

“We made a top ten of most occurring failures and remarkable was that the smallest discrepancies lead to the biggest problems. We could not out-rule that with our standard safety procedures. Our awareness that accidents would be inevitable increased.

You had to simplify a complex world in order to enhance and increase safety. The intention to visualize the risks was acknowledged but our resources were insufficient.

Thorough and detailed investigation of high risks and incidents needs time, resources and results.

Turning point was the explosion at our sea plant. We reconstructed the incidents that lead to the explosion. The incident analysis was executed in the Governors’ Investigator 3 software using the Tripod Beta analysis. Visualized on screen we saw a fantastic cohesion between the latent failures, the active failures and the broken barriers. That gave us the perfect information we needed to get to the recommendations.

The next step we are taking is more pro-active. With the help of the BowTieXP Risk Management software we are able to visualize and to control the risks more easily. Learning from previous incidents we are able to improve our risk management. This is where incident analysis really meets risk management.

The products (Investigator 3 and BowtieXP) combined with the training learned us a new way of communicating about incidents and risks. Communication is of the utmost importance in creating safety in this nearly robotic industry. “In fewer steps we are able to create an improved, more controlled and most important, a more secure environment.”

- Ruud Vellinga -

Corus Headquarters Nederland
Group Process Safety