T. Kontogiannis, "Total safety management: Why?," in Total Safety and the Productivity Challenge, M. C. Leva, T. Kontogiannis, M. Gerbec, O. Aneziris, Eds. London: Taylor and Francis, 2019, ch. 1, pp. 3-21. doi: 10.4324/9781315108100-1
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315108100-1
The increasing complexity of technological systems has brought about a shift in the way that safety management has been perceived. This chapter looks at the guiding principles and safety processes for managing ‘total safety’ while appropriate techniques. Many Safety Management Systems currently in use by major hazards industries have been developed on the basis of ISO standards, such as Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series-18000, hence adopting a more ‘self-regulating’ style where safety becomes the primary responsibility of organizations. A Total Safety Management system should be built around a set of fundamental principles that can be distilled from three sources. These are: the requirements of an application domain; similar approaches that have been proposed in the literature; and field experience and application of the basic principles to a wide variety of case studies. The safety principles of Total Safety Management provide general guidance to develop a set of safety processes that specify, plan, implement and evaluate safety programs.