Safety and Security Decisions in times of Economic Crisis: Establishing a Competitive Advantage

The paper argues that organisations who invest intelligently in safety and security, regardless the macroeconomic situation, will have a competitive advantage over their competitors not doing so. Establishing and maintaining a competitive advantage is all about excellence. Excellent results actually require seven domains to be focussed upon: ‘quality’, ‘effectiveness’, ‘productivity’, ‘safety & security’, ‘efficiency’, ‘ergonomics’, and ‘ecology’. The paper explains each of these domains and shows that safety and security indeed is a very important sub-domain, as part of the ‘value processing’ fundamental process in any organisation, reflecting the ability of organisations to adequately make profits in the long run and independent of economic crisis.Values Technology and InnovationTechnology, Policy and Managemen

An Overview of Cost-benefit Models/Tools for Investigating Occupational Accidents

The safety-related economic (cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness) tools and models discussed in this paper allow the user to execute an investment analysis, in order to evaluate investments in preventive measures related to occupational accidents. The available software shows that there are a multitude of indirect consequences of occupational accidents next to the direct consequences that should be taken into account to calculate their costs and benefits. Furthermore, during the study we noticed that available costbenefit tools clearly focus on occupational accidents instead of major accidents.Values Technology and InnovationTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Het belang van het “Loss Prevention Symposium” voor de veiligheidskunde

Safety and Security Scienc

Anti-terreur in de chemische industrie: “An Inconvenient truth”: Dringend behoefte aan onderzoek en ontwikkeling van proces-security

Safety and Security Scienc

On the future of safety in the manufacturing industry

This paper argues that a new paradigm is needed in the manufacturing industry to further substantially advance safety as part of the industry 4.0 concept. The different domains that need to be focused upon are Cluster-thinking and cooperation, High transparency and efficient inspections, Education and training, Security integration, and Safety innovation. Since society has fundamentally changed over the last two decades, revolutionizing safety via these domains is truly needed in the future as part of “industry 4.0” in manufacturing plants.Safety and Security Scienc

Expertblog: Grootste Europese conferentie over procesveiligheid naar TU Delft

Safety and Security Scienc

Terrorisme en horror in Parijs en brussel – what’s next?: Een terroristische daad met chemische stoffen?

De tijd is gekomen dat antiterrorisme security een volwassen domein wordt in alle chemische bedrijven. De speeltijd is voorbij na de mislukte aanslagen in 2015 op een gasfabriek bij Lyon op 26 juni en een opslagtankfarm bij Marseille op 14 juli. Tot recent waren er de afgelopen decennia geen bekende aanslagen op chemische installaties in het Westen, maar terroristen zijn blijkbaar hun werkveld aan het verleggen en dat moeten we serieus nemen.Safety and Security Scienc

Reflecting on the safety zoo: Developing an integrated pandemics barrier model using early lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic

Our current predicament, the Covid-19 pandemic is first of all a health crisis. However, social disruption and economic damage are becoming visible some 7 months after the Wuhan City outbreak early December 2019. The authors wondered what could have been done better in prevention and repression of the Covid-19 pandemic from a safety management and risk control point of view. Within a case study framework, the authors gathered literature on pandemics, about country response effectiveness, and about human behaviour in the face of danger. The results consist of a safety management oriented narrative about the current pandemic, several critical observations about the current paradigms and shortcomings of preparation, and a number of opportunities for improvements of countermeasures. Many of the proverbial animals in the safety zoo, representing typical behaviours, were observed in action. Based on well proven risk analysis methods – risk management, event tree, scenarios, bowtie – the authors then analyse the generic sequence of events in a pandemic, starting from root causes, through prevention, via the outbreak of a pathogen, through mitigation to long term effects. Based on this analysis the authors propose an integrated pandemics barrier model. In this model the core is a generic pandemic scenario that is distinguishing five risk controllable sequential steps before an outbreak. The authors contend that the prevention of pandemics via safety management based biohazard risk control is both possible and of paramount importance since it can stop pandemic scenarios altogether even before an outbreak.</p