"How do you know if your com­pa­ny's sys­tems can stop the next po­ten­tial haz­ardous in­ci­dent from oc­cur­ring?"Stephen Car­boy, di­rec­tor of op­er­a­tions ex­cel­lence at LNG pro­duc­er At­lantic, asked this ques­tion re­cent­ly when he un­veiled de­tails about the new At­lantic Man­age­ment Sys­tem and its aim to sus­tain the com­pa­ny's re­cent record in safe­ty of more 23 mil­lion hours worked with­out a lost time in­ci­dent (LTI).

The new At­lantic Man­age­ment Sys­tem will be­gin im­ple­men­ta­tion this year and be­come ful­ly op­er­a­tional by 2016. Car­boy ex­plained that some 80 per cent of in­dus­tri­al in­ci­dents around the world were caused by em­ploy­ees not fol­low­ing com­pa­ny pro­ce­dures."At­lantic has put a lot of work in­to our as­set in­tegri­ty man­age­ment sys­tem, in­to our health and safe­ty sys­tem, we have put a lot of work in­to every sys­tem we cur­rent­ly have, but so did many of the com­pa­nies that have had in­dus­tri­al in­ci­dents in re­cent years," he said.

"We go to work every day and work hard to pre­vent these in­ci­dents from oc­cur­ring, but the bar­ri­ers we count on to keep these things from hap­pen­ing (could) fail."

To min­imise the pos­si­bil­i­ty of such fail­ures, the new sys­tem will fa­cil­i­tate a more sys­tem­at­ic ap­proach to At­lantic's op­er­a­tions. "(At­lantic has al­ready) put a num­ber of sys­tems in place and we've de­cid­ed to take an­oth­er look at our­selves and be­come a bit more sys­tem­at­ic," Car­boy said.

"We can see when a flare is not work­ing cor­rect­ly...we can see when our per­son­nel on board (POB) ex­ceeds our safe­ty lim­its ...but it's re­al­ly hard to see when your man­age­ment of change pro­ce­dures aren't be­ing used cor­rect­ly or when your work­ers are get­ting fa­tigued, or your main­te­nance pro­ce­dures aren't quite right.

"The idea of (the At­lantic Man­age­ment Sys­tem) is to un­cov­er that, to force us to re­al­ly look with a strong mir­ror on our­selves."He ex­plained: "The At­lantic Man­age­ment Sys­tem is not about cre­at­ing more, but tak­ing what we al­ready have and get­ting it or­gan­ised–get­ting rid of the over­lap, the re­dun­dan­cy, work on sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. "If peo­ple weren't fol­low­ing it in first place, then you think adding more steps would make it eas­i­er to fol­low?"

Car­boy added that the new sys­tem would en­tail change to the com­pa­ny's cul­ture to en­sure that it re­tains em­ploy­ees' knowl­edge and fa­mil­iar­i­ty with At­lantic's sys­tems and busi­ness. "Or­gan­i­sa­tions have no mem­o­ry, it's the peo­ple–you must find a way to em­bed what the peo­ple know in your sys­tem. Once you have that em­bed­ded knowl­edge, you need to keep im­prov­ing it," he said.

Among the ben­e­fits of the new At­lantic Man­age­ment Sys­tem will be a reg­u­lar cy­cle where em­ploy­ees check for "blind spots", un­known risks and im­per­fec­tions in the com­pa­ny's sys­tems. This will help to en­hance safe­ty through­out the com­pa­ny's op­er­a­tions.At­lantic is the sixth largest pro­duc­er of Liq­ue­fied Nat­ur­al Gas (LNG) in the world, with a rep­u­ta­tion in the in­ter­na­tion­al LNG in­dus­try in the ar­eas of safe­ty, plant util­i­sa­tion and gas tur­bine re­li­a­bil­i­ty.