Abstract

     Precision is the ultimate goal of safety management. Over the past few decades, technological advances and applications (e.g., advances and applications of information technology) in safety management and its research have given safety managers the ability to pursue and realize relatively precise safety management based on sufficient and precise safety information. It can be said that safety management has entered the precision era. Therefore, in the present and future, developing novel approaches to precise prevention and control of safety risks is an inevitable safety management trend. This paper proposed a new and promising approach to safety management called precision safety management (PSM). The main objective of this paper was to answer the following five basic questions regarding PSM from a theoretical perspective: (i) What is PSM? (ii) Why is it necessary to develop PSM? (iii) What are the relationships between PSM and other concepts? (iv) What does PSM do? (v) How does an organization use PSM? Additionally, this paper presented the application of the PSM approach to the precise prevention and control of safety risks in a chemical industrial park as a case study. The main contributions of this paper are a theoretical framework for PSM, and a practical case for PSM. This study can help researchers and practitioners understand PSM and lay the foundation for its future research and practice.

Introduction

     Accidents and disasters can lead to personal injury, social unrest, environmental pollution, and other negative effects (Rajeev et al., 2019). Safety is the bottom line that cannot be ignored in any industry. Safety management is a critical element of organizational management that effectively prevents and defuses safety risks (Wang et al., 2017). Therefore, safety management is a basic premise and necessary guarantee for social development.

     With the advent of the era of precision (Wang, 2018), the concept of precision has penetrated several fields and achieved significant results. Applications of precision include precision agriculture, precision governance, precision management, and precision medicine (Melgar-García et al., 2021, Wang, 2018, Allegaert and Simons, 2021). As an indispensable component of the social governance system, safety management should be considered from the perspective of precision. The rising challenges faced by safety management have become complex and diverse in the information age and place society at risk (Huang et al., 2018). Therefore, there has been significant discussion over the past few decades about how to improve safety management models based on traditional safety management concepts. The era of digital intelligence requires smart management and a smart society should attempt to improve safety risk governance. Therefore, traditional safety management concepts no longer meet the current development needs of the safety field. What safety management urgently requires in the era of precision is to develop an intelligent and precise prevention and control model for safety risks.

Conclusions

     The term “precision” is popular in several fields, including medicine, agriculture, and management. Since safety is the basic guarantee of social and national stability, safety management must progress rapidly and safety risk control must be developed in the direction of precision. This paper identified the current challenges and problems associated with safety management to motivate the urgent transformation of safety management modes. Inspired by the concept of precision, we proposed a novel effective safety management paradigm for the information age called PSM. We analyzed the definition, core, and main functions of PSM and other basic issues. Finally, a PSM model was developed to provide a clear operation framework and detailed research was conducted through a case study to promote the integration of theory and practice.

     From the perspective of safety information, PSM is the process of obtaining safety intelligence by collecting, analyzing, and processing safety information, and using safety intelligence to identify and control safety risks with a focus on improving the precision, accuracy, and validity of safety management work. The era of digital intelligence has introduced changes in thinking and technology related to safety management. PSM breaks out of the traditional safety management paradigm, broadens the vision and depth of safety management, and promotes the formation of intelligent and precise safety risk prevention and control through precise safety identification, precise safety prediction, precise safety decision, and precise safety execution to complement and improve upon traditional safety management systems. Overall, this study puts forward the concept of PSM and further improves the theory and practice of safety management by establishing a theoretical framework for PSM and providing a case study for its practice.