Taking a leaf from China

While perhaps not everyone’s ideal role model, former Chinese ruler Mao Zedong offers some useful object lessons when it comes to bringing about cultural change in today’s process industries.

With his “Little Red Book”, the military and political leader managed to effectively communicate his political, social and economic ideas to an estimated 900 million readers during the Cultural Revolution.

Skip forward a few decades to present-day Europe and we see EC regulators trying to revolutionise the way industry works on several fronts — most notably with chemicals manufacturing and process safety.

In contrast to Chairman Mao, however, our unelected elite have presented process companies with huge volumes of technical and legal information to digest. The net result, as we see for instance with the REACH regulations (PE Nov/Dec, news, p7), is that many chemical companies face being put out of business as they struggle to cope with the red tape involved.

This issue is at its most critical when it comes to the emerging requirements and standards that are intended to underpin safety in the manufacturing sector going forward. As reported in our News Analysis piece on page 9, there is currently widespread confusion over the documents that are intended to inform a new era of safety in the process industries.

User manuals remain a key tool for the communication of safety requirements between suppliers, installers, system engineers and maintenance personnel. But how many are able to read through these increasingly huge and complex tomes — little-read books? — and get to the critical items of information buried deep within?

Until the people writing the rules can get closer together with industry to provide clearer instructions and guidelines, their efforts are always at risk of doing more harm than good - and undermining the industries they are supposedly intended to improve and protect.