Safety and Reliability Society

Members Only

2011-07-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

More SaRS events to come...

2011-07-05T07:43:00.000-07:00

The 21st Century Reliabilty: the way foward event is coming to a close.
Fancy coming to another of our events?
Click here to book.

The Cost and Ethics of Safety

2011-05-24T05:56:00.000-07:00

Today IMechE are hosting The Cost and Ethics of Safety conference at SaRS headquarters in Manchester.

Members Only Area now active

2011-05-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Click here to enter your information and access the exclusive Members Only Area.

21st Century Reliability: the way forward

2011-05-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

The Safety and Reliability Society bring you another event on 5th July, 2011.

Following the success of ‘21st Century Reliability – The First Decade’ the Safety and Reliability Society are convening a meeting of innovative minds for this seminar.

This event will bring together leading speakers from industry and academia to examine the changes, advances and lessons learned in the field of reliability and to look at how these may impact on the development of reliability managers and practitioners going forward into the future. With a diverse content and several industries represented, including defence, oil and gas, and energy, this promises to be a highly interesting and informative event.

Attending this event will help you in the following ways:
· This event will help to work through both theory and practice in reliability and
· To learn how reliability techniques and methodology have advanced during the past ten years, and to discuss the future of reliability
You will also have the opportunity to:
· Discuss reliability theory and practice with other practitioners and experts
· Take part in a formal discussion with reliability experts
· Learn how academics, practitioners and managers work together in the field

Who should attend?
Reliability managers and practitioners – Consultants and stakeholders interested in the future – Industry specialists of reliability – Academics and students engaged in reliability theory – Reliability Engineers

Please click here for the programme.

SAFETY AND RELIABILITY SOCIETY LAUNCHES NEW LOGO AT NEW OFFICE AND CONFERENCING PREMISES

2011-03-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

The Safety and Reliability Society recently celebrated thirty years as the professional institution for safety, reliability and engineering risk management practitioners in all industries. The Society also relocated offices during 2010 to new premises, and is now pleased to announce a change of logo. The new logo, presented above, will be used for all the Society’s business from 1st March 2011

In a process that included a competition for members to design a logo, the Society’s National Council met to make a final decision in January 2011. The Council selected a crisp, clear image to support the clear vision of Value-Engagement-Growth and progressive strategies being adopted by the organisation.

Chief Executive Dr Jacqueline Christodoulou said, ‘On the backdrop of a steady yet developing industrial and educational landscape, the Society has chosen to retain the corporate colours, but streamline the image. This reflects our recent move to One Central Park where the organisation can better grow and thrive, yet retain our founding ethos going forward.’ The Society has moved premises to take advantage of not only modern offices, but also integral conferencing facilities close to Manchester City Centre. Dr Christodoulou commented: ‘Our membership, and the safety and reliability community in general, will benefit from this move, as we will begin to provide more seminars and training opportunities as well as membership services.’

----ENDS-----

---NOTES FOR EDITORS-----

The Safety and Reliability Society was formed in the UK in 1980 and now has members in the UK, mainland Europe and the Asia Pacific region. It also has an Affiliate membership scheme for academic institutions, industrial companies, and other organisations with interests in safety and reliability and engineering risk management and has around 40 affiliate members. A lively regional branch network supports a thriving national events programme, offering training and networking to members and non-members.

The Society is a Professional Affiliate of the Engineering Council and a member of the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA). It is also represented on a number of bodies including the UK Committee for Defence Equipment Reliability and Maintainability, (CODERM), British Standards Committees, collaborative and inter-institutional groups, and technical committees of several of the major engineering institutions. This enables it to contribute to the development of standards and best practice, and disseminate information on such developments to its members.

---CONTACT----
For information, further quotations or photographs please contact:

Kathie Calderwood
The Safety and Reliability Society
One Central Park
Manchester M40 5BP
info@sars.org.uk
www.sars.org.uk
tel 0161 918 6663

Competency and Governance

2010-09-20T05:24:00.000-07:00

I make no excuse for returning to the related subjects of competency and governance. We, as a Society, must be leading national and international recognition of the competency in reliability and safety engineering. Nationally, it is not just the government we seek to influence, but we should be doing so in every board room. Directors of companies need to understand the impact of the decisions they take that have an impact on the safety and reliability of their products.

Competency has two components: an understanding of the theory and experience of the practice of the theory in real projects. Taking the theory component we as a Society have required a Bachelors degree level of theory in a related safety and reliability subject. When the engineering council moved the requirements for C Eng to an academic level of M Eng or equivalent in a related subject we made our corporate level membership equivalent to I Eng. As a result of discussions in council we are now in an anomalous position that if someone with an I Eng qualification wished to join as a corporate member and if they did not have a Bachelor’s level degree then they would need to apply through the experience route. I would like to know what your views are on this which will be passed on to Council.

Please email me: chairman@sars.org.uk or comment at the end of this blog.

So far as establishing a scheme for competency we are aiming for practitioners and certainly experts to understand and apply theory at M Eng level, and the educations standards and CPD committee are working towards this. We would hope that post graduate courses in specific safety and reliability

topics will be available at this level to help demonstrate both Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and Learning through Experience as part of an experience route application to C Eng.

The other part of competency is the bit you cannot learn in a classroom. There are many things we learn in working with others and learning from our mistakes which are essential in building our competency. It’s a long way from being a supervised practitioner to becoming an expert in a subject. In progressing, it is important not to run before you can walk. Recording your progress is important to assist in demonstrating evidence for transition from one level to the next.

Turning to governance, we as a profession have an obligation to draw the directors’ attention and obtain their agreement to those decisions which could affect not just safety, but will effect the reputation of the company and what directors do understand the effect on the bottom line. Please do not assume that the directors will understand everything about safety and reliability; it is our duty to demonstrate that we do understand our subject mater and advise them in a competent way.

One way of addressing the governance issue is to set up a series of gate reviews where the safety present their findings and recommendations to the board and they in return question the team to test their understanding and to determine the risk to the business of any outstanding risks.

Trevor Cockram
SaRS Chairman, 2009-10
email: chairman@sars.org.uk

Looking to the Future

2010-05-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

Where will the Safety and Reliability Society be in the next thirty years? I am not very good at crystal ball gazing and without a Bayesian inference network to make probabilistic predictions with minimal data what I am thinking must be speculation.

Firstly where will SaRS be in 10 years time? If our plans are fulfilled we will be recognised in the UK and internationally as “THE professional institution for safety, reliability and engineering risk management in ALL industries”. We are getting there and with your help this is an objective we can achieve initially in the UK, but we are becoming international with strong interest in the Middle East and elsewhere. We will be awarding Chartered Engineer status in our own right. The External Affairs Committee are actively working on making applications more straightforward and the only real obstacle in being able to make this happen quicker is the number of applications we are making through the Engineering Council to make our awarding status viable. If you have been considering Charted Engineer Status, please look at the website, or contact the Society office.

In the longer term it is more difficult to speculate; there may be just one engineering learned body, I know some institutions have this ambition, or there may be more institutions and bodies.

Where will safety and reliability technology be in 30 years? Even more speculation: will our biggest challenge be one of ever increasing complexity?

Our ability to understand and manage complexity through techniques such as abstraction and systems engineering will grow. On reliability I suggest that we will improve our predictive modelling capability perhaps using artificial neural networks and in my own research area of Bayesian modelling linked to human reliability. The human element will be important both as a source of error and in providing mitigation to failures. For example the British Airways Boeing 777 fuel starvation incident, where the action of the cockpit crew to situation they had not been trained for, but through their actions saved all the lives of people onboard and at potential crash sites.

What about the new and evolving industries we may well become involved with? The next generation of nuclear power stations will be on-line and therefore there will remain the need for safety in management of nuclear waste. There will also be the reliability and safety of alternative energy supplies. We may well be increasingly involved with medical and pharmacological equipment. We may also need to consider the reliability and safety of evolving nano-technology.

Enough of the crystal ball gazing, which comes with the usual health warnings. What I can say is that it’s our Society and the future is in our hands so we all need to help in growing the society and make it “THE professional institution for safety, reliability and engineering risk management in ALL industries.
Trevor Cockram - Chairman

Response from the Safety and Reliability Society to the Haddon-Cave Review into loss of Nimrod XV230.

2010-02-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

The Safety and Reliability Society welcomes publication of the Haddon-Cave Review into the circumstances surrounding the catastrophic loss of Nimrod XV230. The Society’s members’ thoughts and condolences are with the families of the 14 service personnel who tragically lost their lives in the accident. The Society also welcomes the announcement by the Defence Secretary of the creation of a new military airworthiness body in the wake of the tragedy.

The Society is working with other professional bodies to improve safety engineering standards and notes that Recommendation 28.4 of the Nimrod Review calls for improvements in professional safety engineering and Safety Case regimes. The Society notes that compliance with its Professional Code of Conduct could have avoided the shortfalls in professional and ethical standards criticised in the Review.

The Development Director for the Society said, “Given the significance of the tragic loss of 14 lives, the Society hopes that this Review will be the stimulus for improving the MOD’s safety culture to one that our Armed Forces deserve and that it will help shape improvements in wider society. The Society notes that the most radical reform to MOD's airworthiness procedures since military aviation began is now underway. The Society also notes the MOD’s observation that Mr Haddon-Cave's principles and his proposals regarding safety culture have a resonance beyond aviation and we are now looking at their applicability more widely beyond the MOD and that this matches with the Society’s continued endeavours to work as a cross-industry Professional Body.”

The Society will release a fuller analysis of the Review in due course following consultation with other engineering and professional bodies. This will highlight the salient points of the Review and explore parallels with previous disasters from other industries and will be published in the Society’s technical journal and website. In order to institutionalise such important lessons across all sectors the Society wishes to work with all ECUK registered engineering bodies and other professional bodies with an interest in safety, as well as the organisations affected by the report.

The Council of the Society calls on these bodies to join forces with it to help focus leadership in this field, to collaborate with us in defining what Professionalism means, to agree what key knowledge all practitioners within our field should hold and to clearly define the levels of competence necessary to practise.

Welcome to Safety and Reliability Society Blog

2010-02-08T03:40:00.001-08:00

Welcome. The purpose of this blog is to provide a route for open discussion on issues of Safety and Reliability. The format of the blog will cover contributions from members of Safety and Reliability Society committees, contributions from members of the Society and invited pieces for eminent members of the safety and reliability community, and related fields.