Description
Bow tie analysis (BTA) involves the construction of diagrams that depict how prevention and mitigation barriers and controls (i.e. safeguards) protect against threats (i.e. initiating events) that can cause hazardous events, and the adverse consequences that can arise from them. Bow tie diagrams can provide a deep understanding of barriers and controls. They help practitioners to determine the need for new or strengthened barriers and controls and manage existing ones to ensure their integrity.
Why Perform Bow Tie Analysis?
Bow tie diagrams provide a visually intuitive and readily understood depiction of hazard scenarios that is easy for non-experts to comprehend. Consequently, they provide a valuable communication tool to show the hazards and the safeguards that protect against them to stakeholders who may not have a strong technical background, such as front-line personnel and managers.
Bow tie diagrams also help in identifying safety critical equipment and tasks for prioritization in maintenance, procedures development, and training. The identification of critical equipment supports asset integrity programs and knowledge of safety critical tasks supports personnel competency programs.
Process safety incidents often involve the failure of safeguards; misplaced reliance on safeguards that were assumed to be functional, but without verification; or the unrecognized degradation of safeguards. This emphasizes the need for better management of safeguards. Bow tie analysis provides a powerful tool for doing so.
Bow tie analysis is a useful aid in incident investigation. It helps in considering why safeguards failed and allowed an incident to occur. Bow tie diagrams help in sharing lessons learned across an organization and they can be used to identify patterns of safeguard failures across multiple incidents.
Why Primatech?
- Primatech’s reputation for high quality work extends to performing Bow Tie Analysis. We use the same high-quality approaches we employ for other types of hazard analysis studies.
- Primatech offers a training course on the use of Bow Tie Analysis for process safety, delivered both publicly and privately at client facilities.
- Primatech pioneers the development and improvement of approaches for performing process safety studies. We’ve been in business for over 30 years and continuously update our approaches and techniques to conduct project work efficiently and effectively.
Services Offered
- Facilitation of Bow Tie Analysis.
Our facilitators will lead a team of individuals from your site in the construction of bow tie diagrams that depict how prevention and mitigation barriers and controls protect against threats at your facility. We provide a written report of the results. - Development of Bow Tie Analysis Guidelines.
Primatech consultants can help your facility develop technical guidelines for performing Bow Tie Analysis, tailored to the needs of the facility.
