Gary Lumbard, Senior Process Safety Consultant at TÜV Rheinland, will present at Hazardex Live 2025 on Process Safety, discussing the balance between implementing new tools and methodologies, and the risk that this presents to maintaining the basics of a process safety management system.

Within the Process Safety field, we must ask ourselves what else can we do? How can we improve tools & methodologies to improve assessment of risk or drive down the level of residual risk?  We obviously shouldn’t stop thinking this way as there may be better ways to do what we do today and the gains in understanding and efficiencies make businesses more agile. However, when we look at some of the major accidents that have taken place (and continue to take place), the failings are often process safety basics.

This presentation will discuss the balance between implementing new tools and methodologies, and the risk that this presents to maintaining the basics of a process safety management system. This will involve looking to accidents from the past and assessing whether these events were caused by a lack of understanding or poor risk analysis vs. not completing what some may consider the basics of process safety. Is increasing complexity with risk analysis or focus on the new areas driving process safety improvement or is it a distraction? This is to be considered in a business environment where resources become increasingly challenging and adding process safety resource is an ever-increasing difficulty both in terms of cost and availability.

About the author:

Gary Lumbard has recently joined TÜV Rheinland Industrial Services as a Senior Process Safety Consultant.  He is a chartered Chemical Engineer with over 22 years’ experience on upper tier COMAH manufacturing sites in the Fine Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals sectors. Gary has worked in a variety of Engineering and Leadership roles whilst in manufacturing, with the majority of this time focused on process safety, overseeing the Process Safety Management system and COMAH aspects for the site.