Another Word on Developing a Risk Assessment Process

4 Another Word on Developing a Risk Assessment Process 

One of the key findings of the initial review after the accident was that there was no formal, methodical safety risk assessment process. So the company set out to develop one. They decided that it needed to be a uniform and consistent methodology that could be used worldwide, across all product lines. Though product lines vary greatly, how their safety risks should be assessed needed to be very methodical and repeatable. Also, it was important that safety hazards and their associated risks must be communicated to the corporate level in a uniform and consistent manner so that risks could be compared across all operations. 

The company decided to have two levels of safety risk assessments the first is a general or high level that would look at top level risks across the factory or region and the second is a detailed safety risk assessment process that would dive deep into the causal factors of the individual safety hazards. The second would be applied based on the highest-level risks identified by the high-level risk assessment. This is a very useful approach because it allows you to first identify the primary hazards and risks across all operations but then dig deeply into the ones of highest concern—spend the time and money to understand those risks and how to best manage them. 

The corporate office wanted to be sure that the new safety risk assessment process would work and was sustainable. So they piloted it on various product lines in different countries. This gave the company the ability to see if similar safety risks would be identified, determine if risks were evaluated consistently, and test the applicability and ease of the tool to actual safety hazards. It was a resounding success and quickly led to the promulgation of the methodology across all operations worldwide. 

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