A way to successful hazard management

Abstract

The key point of every safety process is hazard identification and management. This is required by many related standards and shall be performed for every project. It's often a challenge to find all possible hazards in advance but it's possibly an even bigger challenge to manage all hazards over a wide range of products and projects. This paper describes in brief the development and the current state of an organization wide hazard management and tracking system which allows for efficient hazard handling. The goal is to act well in advance instead of reacting to problems. The hazard process defines the 'lifecycle' of a hazard: The phases, tasks and responsibilities from its detection to its closing. The state of each hazard is published in the organization's intranet and can be viewed by every employee, which makes the processing of hazards a transparent activity, where everyone has to participate actively or passively. The gained knowledge about hazards is that way directly transferred to new projects where they might apply and possibly contribute to accidents. Additionally, findings about potential failure mechanisms are used for the derivation of checklists, to get another step ahead and prevent hazards from the very beginning of the development of a product. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010.