Getting HSE right and Tr@ction

Getting HSE right

A policy is only effective if people understand it and work to it. Our business-wide HSE management system, Getting HSE Right, helps line managers focus on critical needs, forecast and allocate resources, set direction for HSE activities to improve performance. During the coming year, we will be augmenting Getting HSE Right, to produce a more comprehensive operating management system (OMS) that will help improve our safety management processes and better integrate them with our operational procedures.

We set performance standards at business unit level. All BP businesses commit to deliver specific health and safety objectives as part of their annual performance contracts.

Tr@ction
Our aim is to achieve continuous performance improvements. We can do so if we know how well we are doing at any point in time. Our global reporting and management tool, Tr@ction makes it possible to record and analyse safety performance more effectively than ever before. Introduced in 2001, Tr@ction has more than 39,000 registered users. Over 81,000 incidents or near misses were reported through Tr@ction in 2005. Using Tr@ction to track our safety actions helps to ensure valuable lessons are learned and transformed into improved performance.

Other safety measures

We used a number of approaches to encourage better health and safety standards in 2005: Root cause analysis: a systematic method for investigating all accidents that helps us look beyond the immediate reasons to diagnose and address the underlying cause. Understanding these causes is often the key to avoiding similar incidents in future. Golden Rules of Safety: initially introduced in exploration and production in 2001 before group-wide adoption, the rules set out best practice health and safety guidelines for employees in a clear and accessible way. These rules help avoid repeats of serious accidents and are currently being revised to take into account lessons learnt from the root causes of recent incidents. A new version of the Golden Rules of Safety will be communicated in 2006.

Advanced Safety Auditing (ASA): introduced into BP in 1997, ASAs involves observing people at work, talking to them about the safety risks they face, then reaching agreement on how these risks can be managed. In 2005 over 267,000 ASAs were reported in Tr@ction .

Other processes, focused primarily on ensuring plant and process safety, help minimize the risks to our employees, contractors and the public. These include Hazard and Operability studies (HAZOP), Project health, safety and environment reviews (PSHER) and the BP process safety standard.

The information on this page forms part of the information reviewed and reported on by Ernst & Young as part of BP's 2005 sustainability reporting.