The holes in James Reason’s Swiss cheese model can be represented through escalation factors in the bowtie method. Although, theoretically, that may be true. Practically, it might be of more added value if they are considered to be activities that are part of your safety management system. This blog will show you how to make [...]
Guest blog by Simon Pollard from Evolution Compliance and Management Solutions Ltd. Whilst on a rare family hike in the Dales, an uncle I’d not seen for some time asked me what it was I was doing for a living as he’d heard I’d left what he perceived to be a secure employee role to pursue [...]
Can we do more with the incident data that we collect? That was the subject of the study that Wouter van Kempen (student Msc. Occupational Health Psychology, at Leiden University) successfully completed in close cooperation with a respectable Dutch hospital, during his CGE internship. Read Wouter's account on how they approached the research and what [...]
In 2006, the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries published an excellent article on barriers by Snorre Sklet. The name of the article is “Safety barriers: Definition, classification, and performance” and it is highly recommended to read for everyone in the process (safety) industry who is into barrier thinking. In the article, Sklet [...]
Risk assessments are usually executed by the safety department of an organization, so for them, the management of safety is quite clear. The struggle comes when they try to communicate risk outside the safety department at different levels, from higher management to the work floor. We see more and more organizations using the bowtie method [...]
Earlier this month, The Chemical Engineer issued an article on ‘Using bowties to classify barriers’. Bowtie diagrams provide a simple and powerful description of how risks are managed and readily leads on to identification of gaps or omissions within the system. However, not all barriers or control/mitigation measures are of equal value so it is [...]
The latest version of IncidentXP & BowtieXP, software release 9.2, allows a new way of showing incident data on a bowtie diagram. We think that the bowtie is a communicative tool and as such, we should add as many features as possible that can help you communicate and visualize information. This blog post offers a [...]
During the process of doing a risk analysis, there is a point where companies want to estimate the expected performance of their barriers. This is usually taken into account when doing a final risk assessment on risk matrix level, to gauge the residual risk and ALARP level. But how can you proactively perform a qualitative [...]
Earlier this year, AeroSafety World magazine issued an article on ‘Modeling Common Aviation Risk’. This article talks about an initiative to share safety knowledge within the Aviation Industry, without having to swap internal data. This initiative is called CARM which stands for ‘Common Aviation Risk Models’. (If you’re a Flight Safety Foundation member, you can [...]
Gathering risk scenarios & incident information, and updating them can be an intense job, especially if the available data is scattered over multiple files and multiple formats. Often clients have the need to merge parts of data from different sources and tend to ask for help to do this in a decent manner. Luckily the [...]
