Risk Assessment - Example or How to

Everyone says I need to perform a risk assessment before any job or controls planning. Is there a place to find the right way of "how to"?'

From the sounds of these, it sounds very subjective, so I'm curious to see.

Does anyone have an example I can see? I will not share with anyone unless authorized from you.



Thanks in advance!

Rockwell has a lot of free tools and guides to help with this.

http://www.marketing.rockwellautoma...eSafety/OurSafetySolutions/Safety_Assessments

Safety Automation Builder is the entire suite to help you with assessment and design and verification using Rockwell safety products but you can make use of many of these tools even if you are not using Rockwell products.

A lot depends on the type of machine, industrial, and country of origin, and destination country. There are any number of standards.

MIL-STD-882
IEC 62061
IEC 13849
ANSI RIA-15.06

Just to name a few that I've dealt with in the last few years. Each of these include hazard analysis descriptions and examples in the standard itself. First step is to figure out which standard applies to you.

I would add AB's Safebook 5 as a good place to start.

I've also found that machinerysafety101 has good info albeit with Canadian as well as international standards.

Regardless the procedure is pretty much the same: brainstorm all the risks from using (or misusing) the machine. Assess the probability that it will occur (or possibly avoided), how much exposure there is to the hazard, and the severity of the mess when it all goes pear-shaped. These factors will let you to select how robust the safe guards need to be (or better yet which ones need to be designed out).

It's a lot of work to think of all the things that could go wrong and it should be a never ending process. We discovered hazards that only became apparent after everything was assembled for the first time. Don't just think about how a machine is used. Think about maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair.

It should be a team effort and try to involve people from different disciplines as well. Experience is a good teacher. End users have probably seen machines used and abused in methods engineers would never think of.

The Expert section in the linked catalog contains information on many topics including risk assessment.


https://industrial.omron.us/en/media/Omron_Safety_Catalog_2015_2016_EN_Y25IE03_tcm849-112216.pdf


Hope this will help.

If you have certain larger customers that want to see your assessments or have them included with buy off documentation get an example from those customers. Their internal safety departments/people will usually have their own assessment forms. Using their documentation as a reference can help you focus on what's important to them, keep it in a familiar format, and typically puts their minds at ease a bit more.

After doing so many, you'll find common points and nomenclature between all of them to help form your own internal standard if needed.