The Lines of Risk

By the Risk Alive Analytics Inc. team

Posted April 8, 2025

For a process unit to be fast, accurate, painless, using a single platform loaded with data tools is key. See how Risk Alive can provide these essential tools in four scenarios. What would you do today in each situation?

1 Can I bypass this safeguard safely, while keeping my operational risk low?

Our safeguard centric bowtie allows operators, PSM professionals, and other stakeholders to quickly and easily select one or multiple safeguards and simulate what the overall risks would look like in a plant or facility if these independent protection layers suddenly failed or needed to be placed offline. Would the scenario result in a high risk of incidents related to Fire or Loss of Containment, leading to personnel injury? Alternatively, does the scenario result in only a moderate risk to a slight upset in the process operations. These on-the-spot estimations can be quickly analyzed and decisions made in real time. They are backed up with not just individual personal experience and opinion, but data assessed by expert PHA assessments (including a diverse team of qualified professionals from operations, engineering, maintenance and more) related to your specific unit or site as a whole.

2 Can I accept this PHA, as good to go, without checking for consistency of severity, likelihood, impacts?

Leverage our validation and verification checking in LivePHA™. Find out if your PHA is up to quality standards, or if errors and mistakes occurred during the assessment that could impact the results and findings from the PHA. Have severities been accidentally reduced through copy paste errors or have risk ranks been incorrectly calculated based on crediting information found? Are there inconsistencies in crediting safeguards that were unintended, or have certain recommendations been left uncredited? Were the same threats analyzed multiple times in the same node, leading to distorted risk findings? These validations and much more are available when you upload your PHA to LivePHA™.  

3 Can I safeguard my company, as affordable, finding high risk reduction solutions, perfect safeguard sets for the least cost?

For single or multiple units across your enterprise, identify and maximize your risk reduction with optimal capital savings using our optimal recommendation sequencer. Visualize the initial design risk of your plant based on your PHA assessment along with the independent protection layers applied. See exactly where and what you need to focus on in order to bring that risk down to your acceptable standard. Don’t waste your time implementing costly recommendations with minimal return. Focus on what matters most and what provides the most impact.

Additionally, you may have specific priorities and timelines or want to customize the implementation of your recommendation outcomes. Perhaps a recommendation can be implemented very quickly and reduces a significant amount of risk, whereas others will take more time and planning to complete or need the appropriate window to implement. Shift your planning as you see fit and 
visualize immediately the impact of residual risk for your overall unit. Aggregate multiple PHA assessments and extract the same actionable information to now optimize your turn around planning as you see fit.

On top that, incorporate the costs of each individual recommendation and leverage our Recommendation ROI cost estimator to determine which recommendations on a cost/benefit analysis would be most appropriate for your needs. View your recommendations clearly grouped into calculated ranges based on how critical they are for your overall risk to justify cost and time focusing on the recommendations that are most critical, providing the maximum return on investment.

4 Am I accountable, doing my best, identifying all the high impact scenarios on my process unit? 

Find out if your PHA for a specific unit is identifying and applying consistent threats as other sites across the enterprise. Are similar vulnerabilities being addressed for the same units at different facilities in your company? Our Unit comparison allows a company to address if any of their sites drastically missed a severe vulnerability or mode of failure analyzed at one of their analogous counterparts. It also allows deep diving into which safeguarding independent protection layers are common to these vulnerabilities and at which sites they may be missing.