COOs Can Shift The Safety/Production Trade-Off With Intelligent Operations Management

Production targets do not shrink when a plant needs to shut down equipment, isolate a hazard or review a work permit. The COO’s challenge is to deliver more from industrial assets without exposing people or operations to greater risk. Cutting safety controls is not the answer – instead, the opportunity is to remove the fragmentation of risk data that makes safe production harder than it needs to be.

The 2026 Verdantix global corporate survey of 333 senior managers in operations, production and engineering captures a snapshot of this challenge. Achieving safer operations is a high priority for 54% of respondents, followed by improving asset uptime, reliability and integrity at 51%. Production and yield optimization was a high priority for 35%. For COOs, safety and production optimization should not be competing agendas. They are interconnected aspects of one operating mandate.

Yet the daily reality feels like a trade-off. Job hazard analyses, equipment isolation, permit approvals, contractor onboarding, simultaneous operations checks and fatigue management rules all impose requirements on how and when work proceeds. Bypassing these processes is not an acceptable productivity strategy. Instead, the question COOs should be asking is whether the way those risk controls are connected creates avoidable friction.

Target risk management fragmentation to tackle the perceived trade-off

Verdantix research on AI-enabled industrial risk management points to a new way forwards. Our interviews with operators in chemicals, mining, metals, refining, natural gas production and transport identified fragmented governance, data, controls, insights and workflows as the biggest underlying drag on production optimization – not safety controls themselves. That distinction should matter for executives: their priority should be to consolidate and connect risk management to enhance safety and boost industrial production.

A key tool to help organizations achieve this is intelligent operations management (IOM) platforms, which build on process safety management capabilities, draw on maintenance data from enterprise asset management (EAM) software and enhance the insights generated by asset performance management (APM) software. IOM platforms move risk-based decisions beyond static templates towards contextual, dynamic and near-real-time insights. For a COO, the potential is a more connected basis for deciding how work can proceed safely in a way that also enables higher yields.

IOM has a business case defined by enhanced production

Historically, industrial safety software has been designed around process safety management (PSM) requirements and sold to the VP of EHS. There are compelling solutions in this market, as evidenced by the 2026 Green Quadrant report that evaluated 11 vendors on 120 criteria. But buyers in safety roles typically invest in best-of-breed solutions for use cases such as permit to work, bowtie risk modelling and process hazard analysis. IOM platforms broaden the executive conversation: how can better risk management improve safety alongside availability, performance, throughput, capacity utilization and downtime? And how can improved yields be generated by integrated risk management with more real-time insights? Those are the outcomes against which COOs should test the IOM platform investment case.

The potential value deserves attention. As an illustration, a 1% increase in annual production value at a chemical plant generating $500 million would represent $5 million in additional production value. The investment case should connect safer operations to measurable production gains, rather than stop at better compliance.

COOs should start by asking their plant leaders three questions: Where do fragmented risk workflows constrain production? What would change if maintenance, asset performance and operational risk informed the same decisions? And which safety and production measures best demonstrate progress? The goal is not fewer safety controls. It is better-connected decisions that protect people and unlock higher levels of production. COOs should demand both.

To find out more, look out for our upcoming webinar on how intelligent operations management can shift the safety/production trade-off.