Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2007

Safety was not only a concern of many companies, but also an unavoidable problem of many projects in oil and gas industry which currently was the strongest industry in Vietnamese manufacture and business. Thus, Safety Management System (SMS) was gradually improved by many new management practices which one of them was the Safety Auditing System (SAS). This system could evaluate SMS or any other systems with a checklist which is actually a list of activities set up to support the audit planning. The checklist is also the auditing tool to estimate the Safety System with some key markings (NC, NA, YES and OBS). Therefore, the study objectives were set to identify SMS practices and find out processes of the safety audit in oil and gas construction projects. To meet these requirements, three companies and five projects were studied. Five SMSs were identified by observation, interview and documentation in order to get the overview. Five auditing processes were also studied to evaluate these current SMS. Finally, the result of the study was the common process which had been implemented and applied to evaluate SMS effectively. The more activities of the auditing Checklist which were marked with position key (YES), the better SMS was. Moreover, another result was comments ofSMS practices in oil and gas construction projects. It can be noticed that SMS in international projects was better than others; and in the Safety Management System, Administration & Follow-up were concerned more than other parts in order to support fully all usual and emergency activities on the project sites.

A thesis submitted in pattial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Construction Engineering and Infrastructure Management.