What is barrier management, and how it can help make operations predictable?

Effective barrier management

The Barrier Management module in Synergi Life's QHSE software solution helps companies identify human, technical and organizational barriers and to manage those barriers to secure stable, safe and predictable operations using an integrated system of bow tie analysis and barrier dashboards.

Barrier Management is about understanding what your critical controls are, and assessing and monitoring their status in daily operation. The Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) addresses the purpose of Barrier Management as “to establish and maintain barriers so that the risk faced at any given time can be handled by preventing an undesirable incident from occurring or by limiting the consequences should such an incident occur”. The same principles can also be applied to other sectors.

The Barrier Management module allows you to:

• Identify human, technical and organizational barriers
• Manage threats, major accident scenarios, effects and their barriers in one holistic view
• Have a line of sight from a corporate perspective down to various operational contexts, and individual barrier performance, action plans and improvement
• Identify missing or degraded barriers and manage implementation of corrections
• Proactively implement better controls and mitigations
• Plug in other operational elements such as incidents, audits, inspections, quality events, change programs and maintenance information to create relations between the barriers and any operational disturbances