The International Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) under the auspices of the Working Group on Chemical Accidents has developed a guidance for industry, public authorities, and communities to assist them in designing and implementing a safety performance indicators system. The OECD Guidance on Safety Performance Indicators ( SPI Guidance) was developed in close cooperation with OECD member countries as well as other international organizations active in the area of chemical emergency prevention, preparedness, and response. The SPI Guidance is a companion to, and builds on the OECD Guiding Principles for Chemical Accident Prevention, Preparedness, and Response (2nd edition, 2003).

This document was designed to serve as a tool to assist industrial enterprises, public authorities and communities in the vicinity of hazardous installations to establish and implement SPI programmes. This should help the three stakeholder groups to determine how successful they have been in developing and implementing appropriate requirements, policies and procedures designed to improve chemical accident prevention, preparedness and response, and to assess whether actions taken to implement these requirements truly lead to continuously improving levels of safety overtime.

The guidance does not define a precise methodology, but rather provides guidance on how to develop and use safety performance indicators. It is not prescriptive; rather it provides suggestions related to the elements that might be included in a voluntary SPI Program and provides general guidance on the process of establishing and implementing such a programme. Specifically, it gives the three stakeholder groups tools with which they can design their own SPI programs by identifying key elements: targets, activities indicators and outcome indicators. A safety performance indicator system designed using this SPI Guidance can assist industry in improving process safety.