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 [...]
Guest blog by Emily Harbottle from HarbottleHughes I was asked the other day what advantage a 5x5 risk matrix has over a 4x5 and it started me thinking. A risk matrix is meant to help categorize, prioritize and compare risks, so what difference do 5 or 4 rows or columns really make? I assumed it [...]
A common mistake for beginning bowtie users is to describe threats as failed barriers. For example: “Failure of X”, ‘Lack of Y” or “Absence of Z” etc. Our quick and dirty advice is usually to just rephrase the threat in a positive manner so that it fits the description of a barrier. “Failure of ABS” becomes [...]
One of the guidelines we use when creating bowties is to describe the consequences as events, rather than damage. However, we see that many bowtie-creators struggle with the description of a consequence. In this blog, we explain how to describe consequences in the bowtie. Describing your consequences A common approach is that the bowtie-creator defines [...]
Many companies want to extend the BowTieXP functionality to integrate with their (computerized) Maintenance Management System, so they can display the (real-time) availability of their hardware barriers. Technical barriers usually consist of systems that are made up of multiple parts. By displaying the online/offline status of hardware parts and (sub)systems, decisions can be made in [...]
Loss of containment could lead to fire. Having multiple barriers or controls between those events could give the impression that the operation is well-protected. But what if your barriers are dependent on each other? Many organizations struggle with the level of detail when defining barriers in bowtie risk modeling. For example: should barriers be fully [...]
Bowtie risk assessment is broadly used in high hazard industries. The bowtie modeling has proven to be a successful method to: 1) visualize risk scenario’s and control measures, 2) facilitate structured brainstorming and 3) identify gaps in risk control, by highlighting information that is lacking or unknown. Human Factors: a greater threat than technical [...]
On the 29th of January, Slice and CGE brought together around 50 people for the ‘Barriers at the Botlek’ event, to discuss barrier management practices as experienced by companies who’ve embraced barrier-based risk management, such as Shell, Sandvik and Odfjell. Discussed topics were: barrier maturity levels in organizations, moving from risk registers to a barrier-based [...]
Or more specifically, can we use bowties to structure big unstructured incident data? That was the question that CGE did a presentation on, yesterday, at the CCPS ‘Big Data in Process Safety’ conference in Frankfurt. How can organizations structure their data in a way that enables them to learn? Many organizations have a lot of incident [...]
Organizations want to focus on their primary process, because this generates revenue and added value for their goals. As in any process where humans are involved, human factors play an important role. Risks of potential deviations from the primary process need to be mapped in order to identify causes and system controls. These risks can [...]
