CRE BoK and Risk Management

The New ASQ CRE BoK Group: Risk Management

The 2018 ASQ CRE Body of Knowledge has a new top-level section titled II. Risk Management.

A few of the topics, 6 of the 9, are the same or similar to topics in the previous CRE BoK. There are three new topics that extend the reliability engineers need to know, understand, and use risk management tools.

Overall the new section of Risk Management has three groups of topics:

A. Identification

B. Analysis

C. Mitigation

Let’s take a quick look at the details in this new section and highlight the changes and new elements.

Risk Identification

Risk management techniques topic is new. Building on the suite of tools and approaches to identifying risks in ISO standards and literature, we should be familiar a host of ways to identify and manage risks. The inclusion of the phrase, risk management framework, implies we’ll are familiar with the various available frameworks.

There are frameworks specific to industries and others that are more theoretical than practical. The basic ability to list risks that may impact reliability performance and safety are not new. We often have to consider risks involving technical, scheduling and financial concerns. The basic concept is not new, other than understanding a risk management framework.

Type of Risk is not a new topic. There are a few articles on types of risk under the tag I. B. 3. Types of Risk

Risk Analysis

There are plenty of risks that we should consider within an organization, within a product development process, or within an asset management program process. Just listing the risks is a start, yet we do need to sort, prioritize, organize, and understand the risks in order to deal with them efficiently.

All 6 topics within this group are familiar from the previous body of knowledge. There are a few minor changes and most of the topics are breakout topics from the previous BoK topic of I. C. 3. System Safety.

1. Fault tree analysis is the same as before, yet did drop the mention of the success tree analysis. See III. A. 5. Fault Tree Analysis and Success Tree Analysis for a few articles on the topic.
2. Failure mode and effects analysis combines a portion from system safety and the reliability in design and development topic of FMEA and FMECA.
3. Common mode failure analysis remains unchanged moving from the reliability in design group to risk management.
4. Hazard analysis is not new as it was part of the previous system safety topic.
5. Risk matrix is also not new, likewise a parts of the system safety topic.
6. The system safety elements not extracted to stand alone topics make up the topic system safety. It seems to be a catch all topic focused on identifying safety related issues and considering impact on the program and customers. Of course it include the concept of doing something about the safety issues as well.

Risk Mitigation

This sub group of Risk Management does not have any topics, rather it is a topic in itself. This topic pulls the liability topic from the previous BoK topic of I. A. 5. Failure consequence and liability management and the risk mitigation plans from III. B. 3.  Parts obsolescence management.

Summary

Much of the new top-level group called Risk Management is not new. A few topics will receive more attention and a note to fit reliability work within a larger risk management framework.

Seems we’ll need to add a few new articles on these topics in the coming weeks to flush out the information viable to you as you do your reliability engineering work.

Do you work within a risk management framework within your organization? If so, is it available via a standard or book? Which one? How is the framework working with reliability engineering? Let us know in the comments section below.