A Study Of Safety Management System And Audit In Oil And Gas Construction Projects In Ba Ria – Vung Tau, Vietnam

According to the report of International Labour Organization (URL 10, Website of ILO), 270 million accidents and 2.2 million deaths at work happened every year. Safety issues recently are the major problems and concerns in the construction industry in developing countries. Many efforts have been made to address this problem, but the results have been far from satisfactory when the number of accidents in construction and in industry continued to increasingly dominate. For these reasons, Safety Management System (SMS) including safety audits, safety programs, safety planning and safety tools are reasonably developed and gradually improved.

Oil and gas industry is one of important businesses in many countries including Vietnam nowadays. Currently, with the economic growth of 7%, Vietnam placed in the third rank in the field of oil production among Association of South East Asian Nations countries, after Indonesia and Malaysia (URL1, Website of CNN). With this rate, Vietnam will become the world's 30th largest oil-producing nation in the world (Brown, 2005).

Consequently, a safety auditing in oil and gas project becomes more essential in view of preventing the increasing accidents. This is the new topic which can support the management system and enhancement of effective SMS in the oil and gas industry. Occupational safety and health in Vietnam has been a serious issue for many years. The number of deaths is continuously increasing, while the number of accident is still too high compared with other counties in the world. (Website of Department of Occupational Safety, 2006 and Vietnamese Government Reports of Ministry of Labors)

Especially, construction field always takes the major percent in the number of accidents, death and severe injuries. At present, safety regulation and enforcement in Vietnam is still not adequate. Safety research, in addition, has not been extensively conducted. Lam (2004) and Van (2002) mentioned that the safety management system has not been properly implemented while safety researches are limited. In some countries, although SMS has been applied, the accident rate is still high. Through the use of Safety Audit System, Rowlinson and Lam (2006) revealed the strengths and weaknesses of SMS. The importance of safety audit is noted as followed:

Traditional approaches to benchmarking risk management and safe work performance with incident rate reduction have failed to provide a strong connection between program causes and direct factors influencing risk and loss frequency, Huang and Brubaker (2006). Workplace Audits are shown to be a common form of measuring an organization’s safety performance. Beside, safety auditing is not only the process in determining the ultimate value of an overall safety program, but also the activities examined those that will have the greatest impact.

Mr. Phan Thanh Hai made a case study which main objective was to identify the Safety Management System Practices and Safety Audit Processes and Factors in Vietnam Oil and Gas Construction Project and proposed some recommendations for the improvements of the studied system.
He found out that in construction field of Oil and Gas industry, the Safety Management System has still faced with many problems, and audit safety is using to solve these issues and improve the system. By the measurement method, Organizations or Companies are able to do business each other in their belief, safety and prestige. This auditing approach is also a better method than inspection.

However, the Safety Auditing System is new and strange in construction projects, so it still reveals some weaknesses and limitations. These pitfalls are what an effective auditing method is, how to use auditing tools, and how to make the effective checklist.

During his data collection, he intended to conduct his study with five companies with five identified projects, but there were only three Companies who participated and five of their projects were permitted to be studied. Luckily, ten people were able to arrange their time to join the studied interview in order to get the overview of SMS. However, at least, these situations satisfied his requirement.

His conclusions are elaborated below.
1. Safety management system – these practices are identified in the five projects. The studied methods were the observation, the documentation review and the interviews. The author got the overall of SMS (include Safety Auditing System). Besides, the expert interviews strengthened this awareness. Finally, SMS of the five projects might be clearly known before the safety auditing was studied.

2. Safety auditing process practice – this is the most important objective of this study. The auditing process was also identified by Observation, Documentation, Interviews, and especially Checklists. The Checklist was formed by necessary activities of the SMS audit. The auditor could use many auditing skills to compile, use and evaluate SMS. The request of auditing was that marking and comments had to fill a majority of Checklist’s activities during the audit.

To end the audit, a re-auditing was suggested to implement after the follow-up had given out. It was operated whenever the previous auditing had taken note of unmeasured activities. With five types of Safety Auditing Process, the common process had ever been practiced followed six stages such as 1) Audit Team; 2)Prepare; 3) Implementation; 4) Analysis and report; 5) Follow – up; and 6) Re-audit

3. Safety management system improvements - the Safety Management System Evaluation is found out at the last step of this Study. Five Projects and seven parts of their SMS are evaluated by the audit activities of Projects. It revealed that some international projects have more audit activities than domestic project. And two parts Leadership & Administration and Follow-up System are concerned more than others, whereas two parts Training and Implementation are not concerned properly in oil and gas projects.

According the result of Mr. Hai’s study, activities of part leadership and administration and part follow-up are important of Safety Audit System. They were listed in the Checklist more frequently than that of others. That means they were checked in all studies projects. Activities of part leadership and administration are considered as a necessary part of the Safety Management System.

Besides, the part follow-up also has more activities. They are useful to the audit in order to determine follow-up activities of many emergencies which are particular in the oil and gas construction projects, such as fire case, explosion case, on-site accident case etc. So, the audit has more activities of this part in the checklist.

Finally, during the audit, the auditor was responsible for checking many activities. Among them, activities of leadership, administration and follow-up are the most necessarily important. These parts are the target to reduce accidents in oil and gas construction projects. For this reason, oil and gas construction projects should have a good Standard, effective administration and practical follow up systems.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract
Safety was not only a concern of many companies, but also an unavoidable problem of many projects in oil and gas industry which currently was the strongest industry in Vietnamese manufacture and business. Thus, Safety Management System (SMS) was gradually improved by many new management practices which one of them was the Safety Auditing System (SAS). This system could evaluate SMS or any other systems with a checklist which is actually a list of activities set up to support the audit planning. The checklist is also the auditing tool to estimate the Safety System with some key markings (NC, NA, YES and OBS). Therefore, the study objectives were set to identify SMS practices and find out processes of the safety audit in oil and gas construction projects. To meet these requirements, three companies and five projects were studied. Five SMSs were identified by observation, interview and documentation in order to get the overview. Five auditing processes were also studied to evaluate these current SMS. Finally, the result of the study was the common process which had been implemented and applied to evaluate SMS effectively. The more activities of the auditing Checklist which were marked with position key (YES), the better SMS was. Moreover, another result was comments of SMS practices in oil and gas construction projects. It can be noticed that SMS in international projects was better than others; and in the Safety Management System, Administration & Follow-up were concerned more than other parts in order to support fully all usual and emergency activities on the project sites.