Category Archives: Asides

The purpose of risk assessment

Posted by on June 10, 2011 1 comment
This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Risk Assessment

I’m often asked what seems like a pretty sim­ple ques­tion: “Why do we need to do a risk assess­ment?” There are a lot of good rea­sons to do risk assess­ments, but ulti­mately, the pur­pose of risk assess­ment is best summed up in this quotation:

“Risk assess­ments, except in the sim­plest of cir­cum­stances, are not designed for mak­ing judge­ments, but to illu­mi­nate them.”

Richard Wilson and E. A. C. Crouch, Science, Volume 236, 1987, pp.267

Manufacturing Automation Roundtable

Posted by on September 21, 2010 Comments Off

I had the great plea­sure today of par­tic­i­pat­ing in a round table dis­cus­sion that was held by Manufacturing Automation mag­a­zine at their head­quar­ters in Aurora, Ontario.

Around the table were: Elizabeth Rankin — CSA, Wayne De L’Orme — Ontario Ministry of Labour, Dave Lawson — Advanced Motion & Controls, Jeff Mathyssen — Electro-​​Mag, Rick Sauer — Festo, Dan Fournier — Omron and Lisa Bolton — Sherrard Kuzz LLP.

The depth and breadth of the exper­tise was refresh­ing, and the dis­cus­sion that ranged from stan­dards and har­mo­niza­tion to the prac­tice of safety, work­place OHS  and edu­ca­tion of engi­neers and users was stimulating.

CLB Media is plan­ning to have a video of the dis­cus­sions avail­able on their web site, as well as an arti­cle in the mag­a­zine and on the web site.

For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Mary Del Ciancio at CLB Media.

Watch for the arti­cle in Manufacturing Automation in their Nov/​Dec issue!

The “Inconceivable” Consequences of Failure

Posted by on August 31, 2010 5 comments

A col­league of mine pointed me to this inter­est­ing arti­cle by Donald Christiansen that was pub­lished in the August edi­tion of IEEE USA’s Today’s Engineer mag­a­zine.
As engi­neers design­ing equip­ment, we nor­mally con­duct some form of risk assess­ment. Although many com­pa­nies are still using infor­mal and undoc­u­mented meth­ods, method­i­cal, doc­u­mented risk assess­ments are becom­ing the norm in industry.

Since under­stand­ing the risk related to our designs is fun­da­men­tal to pre­vent­ing those risks from occur­ring, why do we con­tinue to see fail­ures with cat­a­strophic results occur, and why do peo­ple in the busi­ness seem to have the infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary to rec­og­nize a prob­lem, and then sub­se­quently fail to do what is needed to pre­vent future occurrences?

Check out Christansen’s arti­cle to get an idea…

IEEE-​​USA Today’s Engineer.

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