Many industrial processes can go bad in ways that cause catastrophic events. Loss of life. Severe property damage. Environmental disasters. If something gets too hot, spins too fast, mixes with the wrong chemicals, vibrates too much … BOOM!
Your task this week is to talk to Operations and identify what are the really bad things that could happen in the physical process. If you found a risk matrix in Week 11, you can use this as a prompt for your questions. What could cause a financial impact of the size of high or catastrophic consequence? Is there any long lead time, critical equipment that could be damaged? What could cause a customer impact that the risk matrix would consider a high consequence event? What could cause a safety or environmental high consequence event?
The good news is that most organizations have already identified these really bad things, and they have put in redundancy, protection systems, and safety systems to prevent these really bad things from most causes … except for “cyber”. Some have done this through a formal process such as a PHA or HAZOP and this is already documented. Even if your company has not, this task is not difficult with the right two to four people in the room.
Note: The tendency is to overestimate the consequence of most events. A good way to check your work is to determine if weather, supply chain, pandemic, or other factors have caused what you are calling a really bad thing. If the answer is yes, and the company did not have a long term negative impact from the event, it likely does not fall into this really bad thing category.
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List of High Consequence Events In Operations
Event 1:
Why is this a high consequence event?
Event 2:
Why is this a high consequence event?
Event 3:
Why is this a high consequence event?