Fundamentals of Hazard Analysis

podcast episode

Some products and systems are just dangerous, inherently. Understanding inherent safety-related risks permits a team to design out or mitigate those risks. Hazard analysis is the systematic process of identifying and controlling safety risks.

Let’s discuss hazard analysis’s basic definition(s), including the range of industries and standards involved. Plus, let’s review the basic approach to accomplish the analysis.

It should be obvious that understanding safety risks permits your team to deal with those risks meaningfully. The common mitigation or control approaches include design changes, fail-safe responses, early warning capability, and training (as a last resort).

Like an FMEA, hazard analysis creates a prioritized list of action items. Instead of minimizing failures and the consequences of those failures, hazard analysis focuses on safety-related risks, particularly those that are designed into the system or product (inherent). This includes foreseeable misuse and abuse of the system.

Conducting a hazard analysis may not be the primary role of a reliability engineer, yet the advent of failures of safety-related consequences certainly is part of reliability. Working closely with your entire team, including those focused on safety, can provide additional means to improve the right reliability performance and keep customers safe.

This Accendo Reliability webinar originally broadcast on 13 Feb 2018.