Business analytics to advance industrial safety management

The increasing interactions of technical and human elements in modern systems pose new challenges for safety management, demanding for approaches capable of complementing technocentric investigations with social-oriented analyses. Therefore, the reduction of hazardous events frequency in industrial processes and the mitigation of their severity are a continuous open challenge. Learning from past events is essential to ensure an improved design of industrial processes, especially considering the complexity arising in everyday operations. Thus, this chapter describes the application of Business Analytics to manage industrial safety data from hazards reporting systems. The chapter is grounded on the Major Hazardous event Reporting System (eMARS, online version) database of industrial hazardous events. eMARS has been developed in 1982 following the European Union's Seveso Directive to facilitate exchange of lessons learned involving hazardous substances. The database currently has more than 1000 hazardous event reports caused by hazardous substances/materials, collected over 30 years (1979–2018). The work depicts the process required to create a data model for safety data management and subsequent analyses, evaluating useful information to reduce hazardous events and enhance safety levels. The outcome of this study confirms the benefits arising from a robust reporting system and the need for data intelligence systems to empower safety analysts.