How do we know? A journey of self-verification and assurance.

Mature companies have good standards, specifications and maybe even an electrical safety program, but do they know how well these actually work? Verifying how sites perform against the company internal, external standards and processes, usually will involve an element of self-assessment, self-verification and then an external assurance view. The paper will take the reader along the journey the company took of identifying key electrical risks, developing mitigating barriers and bowties, creating a self-verification program and assurance program to determine if these barriers are in place and strong. The key concepts, some details of how these activities were initiated and examples of typical barriers across a downstream petrochemical organisation will be shared to offer the reader a tool for implementation at their sites. The benefit to the reader would be to adopt a similar process to better assure themselves of the integrity of their key electrical risk barriers. Disclaimer: The views within this paper are those of the authors and not the company they represent. Examples are fictitious and to aide explanation. The processes described are in the public domain.