Introduction

Organizations strive for incident-free operations, which require a complex balance of compliance, solid engineering design, sound construction,
operational integrity, appropriate asset maintenance and reliability programs, and trained, competent personnel. Incidents are often a safety-related occurrence, but can also be off-spec product, unexpected down time, or other occurrences that can cause some form of a loss within the organization.   The ultimate goal of Enterprise Loss Prevention (ELP) is incident-free operations, coupled 
with maximum production and 
profitability.

Enterprise Loss Prevention (ELP) is the combined efforts of an organization to achieve incident-free operations by proactively identifying risks and vulnerabilities and taking action to reduce or prevent their impact rather than reacting to incidents and resulting losses as they happen.

While focusing on past incidents can help companies identify and close future gaps in management systems, the money has already been lost in the present. Anticipating and preventing losses in the present is a necessary achievement for any organization pursuing Operational Excellence (OE).

Today, companies are largely reactive, utilizing EHS incident reporting and failure elimination as a means to address failures after-the-fact, which is largely lagging indicator-based. Companies need to shift to predicting failure 
by building out a strong roadmap for ELP through leveraging new technologies to proactively monitor risks to detect the onset of failure – enabling a leading indicator-based outcome.