B-Safe.net

A consortium of engineering firms comprising Technip, Snamprogetti, MW Kellogg and Japan Gas Corporation (TSKJ) was awarded a turnkey Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract for the construction of an LNG plant, the gas transmission system and the residential area by Shell in Bonny Island, Nigeria.

A 20,000 strong multi-national workforce was on site, consisting of Nigerians, South Koreans and many European and American ex-patriots. Concerned to ensure the well–being of the workforce, B-Safe® was engaged by MW Kellogg to implement the sites behavior-based safety process.

Training
B-Safe^® began by training a ‘site-wide’ project team. This covered the underlying principles of behavioral safety, checklist development, managerial alignment, training observers, goal-setting, feedback, and data entry & analysis.

Checklist Development
B-Safe^® provided a list of typical unsafe behaviors found in the construction industry. These came from Prof. Dominic Cooper's earlier HSE research and other work in the construction industry. These were assigned to ‘Observation Checklists’ matching the phases of the building program.

Process
Initially, 150 volunteer observers were recruited and trained to use the checklists, give feedback and set targets with their workgroups in the observation areas set up on site. These observers monitored their colleagues in the construction areas for 10-20 minutes a day for four weeks, to find out how safe people worked.

Based on the 4 week 'baseline period', each workgroup then set an improvement target. Observers continued to monitor daily and verbally gave feedback when observing people. Observation data was given daily to the project coordinator for data entry and analysis. The observers each received a weekly analysis for their areas to give as feedback at weekly feedback meetings.

The project team also followed up any corrective actions, the status of which was reported back to the workgroups. This cycle of events was repeated every 30 weeks or so.

Results
Over 19.4 million man hours, the projects Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) fell 0.13 to 0.03 . Similarly, the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) also reduced from 0.66 to 0.15. These reduction figures represent a 77% improvement across the board.

MW Kellogg later implemented B-Safe^® in Algeria, Belgium, Egypt, and Norway on turnarounds and similar projects.

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