OVERVIEW
Founded in 2007, Smith & Burgess has grown into an industry-leading process safety management engineering consulting firm. Working out of offices in Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Singapore, it specializes in providing clients with expert, safe, reliable and cost-effective process safety management (PSM) solutions.
“With our work, we help our clients make the right decisions. Essentially, we analyze the plans that ensure they operate safely and cost-effectively,” said Smith & Burgess Contract Manager Barry Cristea
CHALLENGE
Smith & Burgess works with major oil and gas companies for analysis of relief and flare system design — one of Smith & Burgess’s specialties. These systems help safely release dangerous gases from process units during upset scenarios, minimizing the risk of explosion. In this work, the employees rarely go into the field. Rather, they review the plans and design updates developed by on-site engineers, ensuring these plans’ safety, efficacy, and alignment with overall project infrastructure.
Despite doing its work from corporate offices, Smith & Burgess is still obligated to follow the same prequalification requirements mandated by their hiring clients. Because of the office-bound nature of its work, Smith & Burgess had no safety department. Therefore, it lacked the staff needed to fully understand compliance mandates to maintain the web portal.
“We’re a small firm,” said Mr. Cristea. “If we had to do all the compliance work ourselves, we’d have to hire additional people to handle all the day-to-day, week-to-week compliance responsibilities.”
SOLUTION
For the last several years, Smith & Burgess has worked with Safety Services Company, North America’s leading provider of safety, training and compliance solutions. Safety Services has helped Smith & Burgess maintain compliance to their hiring clients’ standards, as well as understand safety requirements and updates for insurance needs.
Additionally, they have relied on Safety Services to develop and maintain a custom safety manual.
“With Safety Services, we have experts answering all our questions,” Cristea said. “And we’re very happy with their customer service. When I call, I get through to our safety manager nearly every time. I rarely have to leave a voicemail. But when I do, they respond quickly.”
RESULTS
Smith & Burgess now has 300 page custom safety manual, and by partnering with Safety Services Company to help them manage safety compliance, they are able to save on salary expense for a full-time safety professional.
“Without Safety Services, we’d have to take on the significant expense of creating and staffing our own safety department. Safety Services does everything for us a safety department would do, and much more cost-effectively.”
— Barry Cristea, Contract Manager, Smith & Burgess
 |  |