A systems engineering approach to implementation of safety management systems in the Norwegian fishing fleet

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2013.08.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Systems engineer is applied as a tool for determining requirements for design and construction of a safety management system (SMS).

  • Outlining a simplistic format, identifying, designingand facilitating improvement opportunities in the conduction and application of SMS’s on fishing vessels.

  • Knowledge provision is a key requirement of management systems, through provision of understanding, detail orientation and applicable skills for realization.

  • Outlining, what is to be done and how it is to be completed to accomplish compliance with pertinent legislative requirements.

  • Promoting a combination of documentation and communication arrangements by which the actionsnecessary for management can be bilaterally, satisfactorily accomplished.

Abstract

The fishing industry is plagued by a long history of fatality and injury occurrence. Commercial fishing is hence recognized as the most dangerous and difficult of professional callings, in all jurisdictions. Fishing vessels have their own unique set of hazards, a myriad collection of complex occupational accident potentials, barely controlled, co-existing in a perilous work environment. The work in this article is directed by the Norwegian Systematic Health, Environmental and Safety Activities in Enterprises (1997) (Internal Control Regulations [1]), the ISM Code [2] for vessels and their recent applicability to the fishing fleet of Norway. Both safety management works place requirements on the vessel operators and crew to actively manage safety as an on-going concern. The application of these safety management system (SMS) control documents to fishing vessels is just the latest instalment in a continual drive to improve safety in this sector. The difficulty is that there has been no previous systematic approach to safety within the fishing fleet. This article uses the tenants of systems engineering to determine the requirements for such a SMS, detailing the limiting factors and restrictive issues of this complex operating environment.

Introduction

In the commercial fishing sector the loss of vessels, life and personal injuries have become associated occupational hazards, and are widely acknowledged by fishers themselves as being part of the process of commercial fishing. Statistically speaking, fishing far exceeds any average land-based job, as far as accidents and incidents per man-labour year. The specific fatality rates are remarkably higher than the average for the general male population, in every country that conducts a commercial fishery [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. Any work at sea is considered to be particularly high risk [13], due to the instability of the working platform, the technologies employed and the unpredictability of the dynamic natural environment.

The Norwegian fishing fleet operates in areas with rapidly changing natural conditions where strong winds, frigid waters, darkness and ice constitute a considerable risk for material damages, injuries and loss of lives [14]. In Norway the fishing fleet is recognized as having the highest fatality and serious injury rates of all major employers [4], [12], [15], [16]. This no-doubt is the result of placing an industrial workplace on a moving, oscillating and inherently unstable working platform subject to the vagaries of the sea. Hazardous work is conducted in cramped workspaces, on uneven, slippery and cluttered decks, with operations involving heavy gears and mobile rotational machinery. Indeed the level of risk to which commercial fishers are exposed is much higher than in other closely related industries [17].

According to Norwegian Maritime Directorate [18] the overall national fatal accident risk for fishermen was 90–150 per 100,000 fisherman years. As illustrated in McGuinness et al., [12] this is not the full picture, since the overall fatal accident rate was 8.71 per 10,000 man years (87.1 per 100,000 man years) over a 22 year period, 1990–2011. Evidenced in this work the overall accident rate for 1990–2000 was 12.12 per 10,000 man years, and fell to 5.26 for the period 2001–2011, showing a considerable improvement over fatal accident risk within the fishing fleet within the past decade. It is however clear that the fatality accident risk in the small coastal fleet is considerably higher than that of the other two fleets throughout the progression of time. Indeed during the 22 year period studied, the average risk of fatalities per 10,000 man years in the small coastal fleet was 33.23, more than five times higher than the medium to large coastal fleet, at 5.85 and 10 times higher than the deep sea fleet, at 3.45. However, when divided into two 11 year periods the rate of fatalities in the small coastal fleet was 44.86 per 10,000 man years for 1990–2000 and 21.2 for the period 2001–2011. The medium to large coastal fleet's accident rate fell from 7.8 to 4.11 over the same periods, while the deep sea fleet's accident rates were 5.42 and 1.45 respectively. Therefore according to these figures, although the overall rates per fleet have fallen, for the last decade the small coast fleet still has 5 times the fatality accident risk of the medium to large coastal fleet but 14 times higher than the deep sea fleet.

In accordance with the report from the Norwegian Maritime Directorate [18], McGuinness et al., [16] has also outlined a year on year decrease in reported occupational injuries in the Norwegian fishing fleet over the 12 year study period (2000–2011). The average injury incident rate as per the 12 year study period stands at 156 per 10,000 man years, although this figure fails to truly convey the great strides and improvements in the reduction of fisher injuries. A more inspiring recounting would be that in 1999 the occupational injury rate stood at 253.8 per 10,000 man years according to Ref. [18], however, has fallen steadily to as low as 75.43 per 10,000 man years in 2011, representing a reduction of 71% in 13 years. The majority of reported injuries during the study period have occurred in the deep sea fleet (64.8%), most notable among the constituents of this fleet being the trawler fleet with 37.3% of all injuries and an incident rate of 270 per 10,000 man years. During the 12 year study period the medium to large coastal fleet, accounts for only 21.2% of all injuries and an average incident rate of 174 per 10,000 man years for both its fleet groups. Demonstrating remarkable low levels of injuries per year the small coastal fleet suffered an average incident rate of injuries no more than 86 per 10,000 man years accounting for only 14% of all injuries during the time frame of the study. This last result is juxtaposed with the fact that this fleet is known to suffer from the highest incident rate of fatal accidents [12], and hence there is suspected to be a low injury reporting level from this fleet in general.

Despite these specific Norwegian improvements more is still required nationally and internationally since these trends are seen in many fisheries nations. In order to further reduce the instances of these accidents in fishing, many national and international intervention strategies have been proposed to increase safety and reduce risk within this industry. The active management of safety in a systematic manner is the most recent of these strategies, whereby through operation of a safety management system onboard a vessel, safety can foreseeably be increased, risks reduced, controlled and managed, and records and documentation of the activities conducted in the interest of safer operation maintained for future reference.

The management of occupational health and safety varies considerably from country to country due to inherent regulatory and legislative requirements, safety culture, history and local culture, and finally the variations of company size and business type. A safety management system (SMS) is intended to act as a framework to allow an organization, as a minimum, to meet its legal obligations under occupational health and safety law, but with the envisaged ability to exceed these specific requirements and provide for long-term safer and more efficient work environments. A SMS provides a systematic way to identify hazards and control risks to a level that is as low as is reasonably practicable (ALARP). The structure of a SMS is generally speaking, not of itself a legal requirement, but can potentially be developed to represent an extremely effective tool to systematically organize the myriad aspects of occupational health and safety that can exist within an organization.

A SMS can therefore be defined as a systematic, explicit and comprehensive process for managing safety risks, providing for goal setting, planning, and measuring performance. A SMS can additionally be defined as a set of persons, resources or policies that interact in an organized way to reduce damage and losses generated in processes in the workplace [19]. In this light the majority of SMS guidance is intended to allow a degree of flexibility in the structure and details of the SMS. This flexibility is needed to allow adaptation to the company's practices, and local circumstance, but in addition it is a requirement identified in the literature for introducing acceptance among employers and employees so that it truly becomes part of the safety culture and the way in which people do their jobs. An extremely important consideration in the development of a SMS for fishing vessels where cultural and personal freedom aspects interact negatively with proscribed actions and behavior delimited by outside bodies.

“Safety” can be defined as the control of recognized hazards to achieve an acceptable level of risk [20]. “Management” is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively, comprising of planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an effort for the purpose of accomplishing a specific set of desirable goals [21], [22], [23]. Chapanis [24] defines a “System” as an interacting combination, at any level of complexity, of people, materials, tools, machines, software, facilities and procedures designed to work together for some common purpose, in this case health and safety.

The work in this article is directed by the regulations relating to Systematic Health, Environmental and Safety Activities in Enterprises (1997) (Internal Control Regulations) [1] and their recent applicability to the fishing fleet of Norway. This document relates the specific requirements for operating a safety management system under legislation, but also refers to and requires fulfilment and compliance with all previous prescriptive legislation that must also be managed under the umbrella of a SMS. This work is also guided by the requirements of the ISM code 2010 (International Safety Management Code) [2], for safety management on vessels. This code relates to the safety and environmental practices that are necessary as a minimum for compliance to International Maritime law. At present this code, which was designed more specifically for merchant vessels, has been adopted by a limited number of jurisdictions with regards to their fishing fleets. It is foreseen however that in the future the ISM code and its tenants of safety management will become the standard safety operating procedure for the global fishing fleet, dictating how safety is to be actively managed within the future industry. For the purposes of this article the research has been limited to the aspects of health and safety, which require that all employers implement an occupational SMS in order to provide evidence of conformance.

Systems engineering has been chosen as the medium for systematized exploration of the core issues in applying a SMS to a fishing fleet. This methodology has many benefits in that it enables the detailed examination of the numerous constrictive elements to adequate design faced within a fleet application, allowing initially for comprehensive deconstruction of the basic requirements while further facilitating an iterative construction process for development of a best fit solution to the problem area. Since the content factors of the SMS activities proposed in the legislation must be adaptable to the nature, activities, risks and size of the enterprise, to the extent required to comply with requirements set out in the legislation, there is a great deal of scope in the management process for incorporating this variability of size and activity. At the same time the extent of the SMS must be developmentally tempered so that the finished work provides this adaptability to all manner and size of fishing enterprise, while still providing the advantages of increased safety onboard and a structured management process.

This article while intended to outline both the necessities for the application of Internal Control and the ISM code in the fishing fleet, also outlines a proposal for this systematic process by which safety management can be undertaken on board in order to secure the safety of the vessels and their workers in addition to ensuring compliance with these legislative requirements. In this regard process elements, such as risk assessment and planning, are thus increasingly emphasized, while enabling the production of the necessary documentation to prove conformance with the tenants of legislation, through conduction of the proscribed activities. A workable SMS necessitates thinking systematically and designing a system from bottom up and top down perspectives, which takes account of both current requirements of the legislation and apparent future developments, inclusive of the abilities, knowledge and skill, necessities and resources of the individual units, as readily facilitated by the systems engineering thinking process applied.

The objective of this article is the provision of a systematic approach to safety management by which all legislative health and safety requirements can be adequately defined and managed onboard any size of commercial fishing vessel. Despite the large size difference in and among vessels and the numbers of crew they employ the SMS requirements in Norwegian legislation are now applicable to all fishing vessels. Therefore a SMS design such as that proposed must be applicable to all, since by having one system to fit all, a standard approach can be applied throughout the entire fleet independent of vessel size. A standardization of the system contents over all constituent fleets ensures the completion of all basic tasks related to the operation of the system and the vessel. Standardization also ensures compatibility and comparability between vessels within the same size range allowing for accurate determination of completeness under external examination, the definition of further improvement orders as required under legislation and facilitates increased control over safety through shared development and continuous learning.

Although a standardization of a SMS approach is outlined, the depth of detail to which the operators will delve will vary dependent on the size of vessel and employee numbers within each fleet group. Hence this proposed theoretical framework was designed, with the specific intent of having one standard system but with a number of system standards based roughly on each vessels size range and risk profile and inherent safety management capabilities which a size range entails. Obviously requiring the same standard of SMS from a small vessel “smack” as from a large industrial trawler could lead to wide scale substandard application. Therefore, in this regard the specific language of legislative directive phrasing on the necessities of an appropriate SMS has been taken to heart, requiring “a system of a size and commensurate of the vessels activities”. This functional adaptability has been built into the proposed system, enabling variation in the specific detail requirements based on size and risk profile onboard each vessel.

While the selected standard topic areas are common requirements to all vessels and must be dealt with as appropriate onboard each vessel, the necessities for expansion and exploration under each topic heading can therefore be varied dependent on the specific safety factors relevant to each vessel group. This requires larger vessel operators to examine the safety topics of greatest concern onboard in greater depth of detail given their increased resources and larger risk profile, while smaller operators can delimit their work based on their specific risk requirements and safety management capacity. Thus through the enterprises own self-knowledge, sizing of the SMS can be conducted, so as to make the system most applicable to their particular circumstances and needs.

The remainder of the article consists of the following: the systems engineering methodological approach is illustrated in Section 2, presenting delimitation of the requirements of the guiding documents and the implementation principles and recommendations of systems engineering for development of a SMS. Section 3 consists of the examination and explanation of the iterative results of this approach determining the necessary requirements of an overall operational SMS for fishing vessels and the attendant implementation scenarios. Section 4 discusses the intrinsic worth of such work in the determination and implementation of a SMS for fishing vessels. The conclusion of the study presents the relative merits of this approach and the further work necessary in defining and refining the requirements to be placed on the operators and crew of any size of fishing unit.

Section snippets

Methodology – systems engineering

INCOSE [25], the International Council on Systems Engineering, defines system engineering as “an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems”. As a calling, systems engineering provides a systematic framework of rules for the specification of complex systems in as unambiguous a manner as possible [26]. The systems engineering process is a road map by which system engineers navigate through the necessary steps and iterations of the design process, i.e.,

Overview

Following innumerous iterations, hypothesizing and inferences on the character and structure of a realistic and effective SMS for use on commercial fishing vessels, a basic and practical solution has been arrived at; accommodating the aforementioned technical and knowledge based restrictive issues and based extensively on the extant legislative requirements for fishing vessels in Norway but also applicable elsewhere. The initial steps in the development of the system involved the detailed

Discussion

In Buede [31] the systems engineering process is applied here, as a process of decomposition of the stakeholder requirements and limitations through analysis, definition of specifications and function of the system and design requirements for the component elements. Followed by the re-composition process, through which integration of these functional elements is undertaken, including consideration of their interactions with each other and the environment.

The systems engineer seeks the best

Conclusion

Systems engineering has been applied as a tool for determining requirements for design and construction of a system fit to meet the needs of this unique work environment. The SMS has been designed to facilitate active improvement in safety performance onboard the Norwegian fleet, through provision of guidance and instruction on how to become legislatively compliant under Internal Control and the ISM Code. As such, this work has been beneficial in identifying the key requirements for fishing

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