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Safety engineers focus on development and maintenance of the integrated management system. They act as a quality assurance and conformance specialist.
Health and safety engineers are responsible for developing and maintaining the safe work systems for employees and others.
The scope of a safety engineer is the development and maintenance of the integrated management system. Safety engineering professionals must have a thorough understanding of legislation, standards and systems. They need to have a fundamental knowledge of safety, contract law, tort, environmental law, policy, health, construction, computer science, engineering, labour hire, plant hire, communication and psychology. Professional safety studies include construction and engineering, architectural design of systemss, fire protection, ergonomics, system and process safety, system safety, safety and health program management, accident investigation and analysis, product safety, construction safety, education and training methods, measurement of safety performance, human behavior, environmental safety and health, and safety, health and environmental laws, regulations and standards. Many safety engineers have backgrounds or advanced study in other disciplines, such as occupational health and safety, construction management and civil engineering, engineering, system engineering / industrial engineering, requirements engineering, reliability engineering, maintenance, human factors, operations, education, physical and social sciences and other fields. This extends their expertise beyond the basics of health and safety.
They must be personally pleasant, intelligent, and ruthless with themselves and their organisation. In particular, they have to be able to "sell" the failures that they discover to inspectors/ auditors, as well as the attendant expense and time needed to correct them. Often facts can be uncomfortable for the business.
Safety engineers have to be ruthless about getting facts right from others, this includes from their fellow managers and engineers. It is common for a safety engineer to consider registers, plant and equipment, training and competency problems in the same day. Often the facts can be very uncomfortable.
Safety engineers work in a team that includes other engineering disciplines, project management, estimators, environmentalist, asset owners, regulators, doctors, auditors and lawyers.
Safety works well in a true risk matrix system, in which safety is a managed by the ISO3100 risk management system and integrated into the safety, quality and environment management systems. However, hierarchy of controls may be more suitable for smaller groups of less than 5 workers as it’s easier to digest.
Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewage systems, pipelines, structural components of buildings, and railways.
Professional certification, trade certification, or professional designation, often called simply certification or qualification, is a designation earned by a person to assure qualification to perform a job or task. Not all certifications that use post-nominal letters are an acknowledgement of educational achievement, or an agency appointed to safeguard the public interest.
Safety engineering is an engineering discipline which assures that engineered systems provide acceptable levels of safety. It is strongly related to industrial engineering/systems engineering, and the subset system safety engineering. Safety engineering assures that a life-critical system behaves as needed, even when components fail.
Broadly speaking, a risk assessment is the combined effort of:
Safety is the state of being "safe", the condition of being protected from harm or other danger. Safety can also refer to the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk.
A safety-critical system (SCS) or life-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in one of the following outcomes:
Hazard analysis and critical control points, or HACCP, is a systematic preventive approach to food safety from biological, chemical, and physical hazards in production processes that can cause the finished product to be unsafe and designs measures to reduce these risks to a safe level. In this manner, HACCP attempts to avoid hazards rather than attempting to inspect finished products for the effects of those hazards. The HACCP system can be used at all stages of a food chain, from food production and preparation processes including packaging, distribution, etc. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) require mandatory HACCP programs for juice and meat as an effective approach to food safety and protecting public health. Meat HACCP systems are regulated by the USDA, while seafood and juice are regulated by the FDA. All other food companies in the United States that are required to register with the FDA under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, as well as firms outside the US that export food to the US, are transitioning to mandatory hazard analysis and risk-based preventive controls (HARPC) plans.
Facilities engineering evolved from "plant engineering" in the early 1990s as U.S. workplaces became more specialized. Practitioners preferred this term because it more accurately reflected the multidisciplinary demands for specialized conditions in a wider variety of indoor environments, not merely manufacturing plants.
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time. Reliability is closely related to availability, which is typically described as the ability of a component or system to function at a specified moment or interval of time.
Integrated logistic support (ILS) is a technology in the system engineering to lower a product life cycle cost and decrease demand for logistics by the maintenance system optimization to ease the product support. Although originally developed for military purposes, it is also widely used in commercial customer service organisations.
A hazard analysis is used as the first step in a process used to assess risk. The result of a hazard analysis is the identification of different types of hazards. A hazard is a potential condition and exists or not. It may, in single existence or in combination with other hazards and conditions, become an actual Functional Failure or Accident (Mishap). The way this exactly happens in one particular sequence is called a scenario. This scenario has a probability of occurrence. Often a system has many potential failure scenarios. It also is assigned a classification, based on the worst case severity of the end condition. Risk is the combination of probability and severity. Preliminary risk levels can be provided in the hazard analysis. The validation, more precise prediction (verification) and acceptance of risk is determined in the risk assessment (analysis). The main goal of both is to provide the best selection of means of controlling or eliminating the risk. The term is used in several engineering specialties, including avionics, chemical process safety, safety engineering, reliability engineering and food safety.
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a concept of maintenance planning to ensure that systems continue to do what their user require in their present operating context. Successful implementation of RCM will lead to increase in cost effectiveness, reliability, machine uptime, and a greater understanding of the level of risk that the organization is managing.
Quality engineering is the discipline of engineering concerned with the principles and practice of product and service quality assurance and control. In software development, it is the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures with a high quality standard.
A building engineer is recognised as being expert in the use of technology for the design, construction, assessment and maintenance of the built environment. Commercial Building Engineers are concerned with the planning, design, construction, operation, renovation, and maintenance of buildings, as well as with their impacts on the surrounding environment.
Building services engineering is a professional engineering discipline that strives to achieve a safe and comfortable indoor environment whilst minimizing the environmental impact of a building.
Prevention through design (PtD), also called safety by design usually in Europe, is the concept of applying methods to minimize occupational hazards early in the design process, with an emphasis on optimizing employee health and safety throughout the life cycle of materials and processes. It is a concept and movement that encourages construction or product designers to "design out" health and safety risks during design development. The concept supports the view that along with quality, programme and cost; safety is determined during the design stage. It increases the cost-effectiveness of enhancements to occupational safety and health.
Project commissioning is the process of assuring that all systems and components of a building or industrial plant are designed, installed, tested, operated, and maintained according to the operational requirements of the owner or final client. A commissioning process may be applied not only to new projects but also to existing units and systems subject to expansion, renovation or revamping.
Technical Integrity Engineering is a term applied to the engineering disciplines associated with the design, assurance, and verification functions that ensure a product, process, or system meets its appropriate and intended requirements under stated operating conditions. Application of these disciplines minimizes the cost, schedule, technical, and legal risks of a program and improves the overall life cycle cost.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to applied science:
Human Systems Integration (HSI) is an interdisciplinary managerial and technical approach to developing and sustaining systems which focuses on the interfaces between humans and modern technical systems. The objective of HSI is to provide equal weight to human, hardware, and software elements of system design throughout systems engineering and lifecycle logistics management activities across the lifecycle of a system. The end goal of HSI is to optimize total system performance and minimize total ownership costs. The field of HSI integrates work from multiple human centered domains of study include training, manpower, personnel, human factors engineering, safety, occupational health, survivability and habitability.