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This paper highlights some of the issues facing owner/operators when attempting to align personnel, procedures, and equipment to achieve cost effective and safe operating performance. Each issue is presented using simple and practical thoughts toward life, collected from fortune cookies consumed during the technical editing of CCPS's Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems (2007).

Achieving operational excellence requires that the chosen risk reduction strategy meet or exceed expectations in a cost effective manner. Cost effectiveness is often interpreted by front-line personnel as minimum cost, time, and resources with “minimum” being controlled by today's budget. Unfortunately, doing more with less generally does not lead to safe or reliable operation and it does not support continuous improvement. Balancing safety and production goals is a constant struggle. Production projects yield rapid results with a high certainty of measurable impact in a defined time frame. In contrast, safety projects seek to prevent an event, such as an injury, and do not produce anything that can be measured in real-time. When negative safety trends can be detected, the systemic problems are generally extensive and run deep within the organization. It is undeniable that safety and production are not only compatible, but also highly interconnected. Reliable production units rarely have safety incidents, while unreliable ones tend to repeatedly experience abnormal operation. The historian John Lewis Gaddis defined strategy as “the process by which ends are related to means, intentions to capabilities, and objectives to resources” (Alden, 2006). This paper discusses various issues associated with achieving safe operation of process equipment. Each issue is presented in the context of a fortune cookie to remind the reader that these issues have existed from many years. In most cases, the solutions are also well known and generally require deployment of reliable means, dependable capabilities, and competent resources.

Industry leaders recognize that investment in resources and safety equipment to prevent process incidents is essential to achieve the lowest lifecycle cost. But, there are many who lag behind. Without care and attention, incidents invariably happen when the “wrong conditions” occur at the “wrong time.” All owner/operators must realize that the management of safety risk is an inherent part of process design and operation and that demonstration of safe operation is required for their license to operate. Defining and maintaining a comprehensive risk reduction strategy takes effort. To reach the top of the mountain, owner/operators should: ●Assign responsibility and hold personnel accountable, ●Audit to ensure practices and procedures are followed, ●Question norms and reduce risk further when practical, ●Integrate business and process safety goals, ●Track performance, address bad actors, celebrate success, and ● Learn and remember. Continuous improvement does not have a defined beginning or end, because safety is an everyday thing. Safety isn't supposed to be easy. If it was, there would be no need for volumes of practices and guidelines to get it right. There would be no need for public relations campaigns involving barbeques, t-shirts, and posters. To succeed, safety must be a business value. Achieving it is a virtue.