Quantitative Risk Assessments (QRA) are considered to be a key part of the ‘toolkit’ for understanding safety risk at hazardous facilities across a wide range of scenarios.
At Gexcon, our X-Suite software offers a number of QRA tools including FLACS-Risk, RISKCURVES and Shell Shepherd.
As part of our commitment to helping make the world a safer place, we decided to reach out to our communities for a more detailed understanding of the value of QRAs.
The research showed that most engineers, safety experts and facility operators use a commercial tool to complete QRAs, which are generally used to comply with regulatory requirements.
QRAs are mostly commissioned during the design stages of new facilities and during operations.
More than 80 per cent of respondents believed that maintaining a ‘live’ view of risk throughout the lifecycle of a facility, plant or building is important.
A total of 77 per cent said they were satisfied and very satisfied with QRAs as a reliable way to measure safety risk. And, 80 per cent considered them to be trustworthy.
While the survey suggests that the industry feels QRAs are generally a trustworthy approach that adds value, they also raised some common concerns.
Respondents noted that the effectiveness of QRAs is user and data availability dependent. Different inputs/assumptions can lead to very different answers with results being easily manipulated.
There were concerns that QRAs could be used as a box-ticking exercise and did not take into account underlying factors such as management systems, safety cultures, working practises and additional safety features.
While practitioners accepted that there are large underlying uncertainties, they noted that these were not typically included in a meaningful quantitative way.
They also reported that it was often a challenge to communicate the results to stakeholders such as managers and executives to make them understandable from a cost and design perspective.
Chris Coffey, Global FLACS-CFD Product & Strategic Business Development Manager, said the results of the survey provided some useful insights.
“Many thanks to everyone who took part in our QRA survey. Gexcon is committed to helping make the world a safer place and we can only do that by having a detailed knowledge and understanding of the challenges being faced by engineers, facility operators and safety specialists working in the field.
The survey confirmed our own anecdotal evidence of how QRAs are used but also raised some interesting questions around issues such as uncertainty and reporting.
Taking these results, we can identify ways to keep improving our products and services to ensure we meet the needs of our clients.”
A total of 176 people took part in our survey which was conducted in October 2020.
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