A MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR ACCIDENT PREVENTION IN A LAND-BASED OIL-WELL DRILLING INDUSTRY

Land-based oil-well drilling, a high-hazard industry needs to have a better model for accident prevention if their accident rates are to be reduced. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a Management Information System (MIS) model for accident prevention in the oil-well drilling industry which emphasizes the decision models subsystem. The MIS uses the legal requirements and total accident costs as sources of motivation; it also uses a management causation model as its principal basis. Hence, the underlying causes of accidents are the poor management practices. Managements need to be provided with information which motivates and assists them in minimizing and eliminating the causes of accidents. This MIS provides the required information. This system can reveal the underlying causes of accidents and how they should be corrected; it can also monitor the safety performance of managers and workers. For motivation purposes, the system transforms accident data into cost expressed as man-hours and reports them to management. To assist management in the improvement of the existing Management Safety Policy this MIS can predict the long-term losses that will be incurred by rig managers provided that the present safety performance of managers remains the same. It also calculates the relative cost effectiveness for each correction alternative. By feeding a one-year accident data set into the MIS, the system found that the key to accident prevention was to concentrate efforts on the elimination of minor but frequent accidents. It also indicated that the task assigned to floorhands was the most hazardous and that workers at a high risk to injury were those employed within the first three months.