I'm new to this, how do I start?

...is a question we are asked very often. So the first thing to say is – you’re not alone or unusual. We all started here.

Feel free to contact us and discuss your particular situation – our advice is always based on your particular needs and they are likely to be unique to yourself. That said, there are some areas that we’d generally focus on for someone or for a site who is just starting out on their functional safety journey.

Get some training!

You might start out with a ½ day “Introduction to Functional Safety” training course, either at your premises or presented Live Online. We’d make the training entirely customised to what you and your company do. The intro training can be for the managing board, the engineering team, for instrument technicians or operators. The training is tuned to the particular needs of the audience. We develop the training by selecting from various training modules – then adding anything extra that we feel is important to be included just for you. More detailed training is available if you need that too.

Let us review your work

We can do this in detail or at a high level – just choose how many days you’d like us to spend. What we review might be hazard study reports (perhaps a HazOp or a LOPA, a safety requirements specification or design documentation). Each stage of the functional safety lifecycle has its own specific documentation. This is essentially a gap analysis – we’ll let you know in as much detail as you’d like what the gaps are and how you might go about closing them in the most efficient and effective way.

Stage 4 Functional Safety Assessment

If you are operating a process, we’d recommend a Stage 4 Functional Safety Assessment (a structured review of the level of compliance being achieved by your installation, your technicians and your operators). If we find significant compliance gaps, such that continuing the assessment would not deliver new insights in to compliance, then we will stop the assessment and work out what we should do together. Often we switch from being assessors to doing actual (useful!) gap-closing work if it becomes clear that continuing the assessment is not going to be useful.

Review your FSM procedures

Ultimately, this is where we’ll need to record your approach to functional safety and ensure compliance. If you have procedures already, we can review them. If you don’t have them we can help you write them.

If you’d like to know more about the what, why and how of the things we do, please see our About Us page, which gives you some sense of our values and approach.