Risk Assessment

The risk management module should have the ability to assist operators to:

• Identify pre-event influences that will determine the damage potential of the asset failure, including size of asset, damage potential, protection system, time to repair
• Assess the overall control measures related to the asset and its part in the system or service delivery (control, redundancy issues etc.)
• Identify all failure events, from minor (maintenance) to catastrophic failure
• Identify the consequences of failure in economic cost terms ($) for each failure event for complete systems and different asset types within each system. Consequence of failure issues include:
  • Direct additional costs of failure to asset itself
  • Indirect costs of failure
  • Injury to staff and public
  • Damage to property
  • Damage to other services
  • Loss of public image
  • Environmental damage
  • Litigation
  • Effect on business/public
  • Impact on customers.
• Identify the current probability of failure for each event from predictive modelling systems eg condition decay/mean time between failure from CMMS
• Determine the current Risk Cost for each asset
• Rank criticality of assets.

Litigation Reduction

The key issue of any defence in litigation about asset failure is judged against due care and responsibility.

The most plausible defence against any litigation that may arise through the failure of assets is to show that the organization has taken all possible precautions towards predicting and avoiding the failure.

In general, this will mean linking well-maintained asset registers, maintenance management systems, standard procedures and levels of service to the risk management information and decision making system.