In a capital project, risk information is produced by many parties and owned, in practice, by none: The register goes stale between workshops, safety responsibilities blur across interfaces, and changes move faster than their assessment.

DSIB carries this ownership on the client’s behalf:

• The risk register: DSIB defines the risk breakdown structure (RBS) and risk factors the register is built on, organizes the risk workshops, maintains the register, draws the strategic decisions it should trigger at the right time, and keeps operations teams and executives informed as the risk picture changes
• Multi-party safety interfaces: Across owner, contractor, stakeholders, vendors and licensors, DSIB tracks and manages the responsibilities the safety-critical element lifecycle requires
• Deviations and change: Safety-critical changes arrive at any stage of a project — DSIB reviews technical deviations and non-conformities independently, provides safety checkpoints inside the MoC workflow, and advises on the design stage at which a change is least costly to resolve

DSIB’s Critical Thinking Series articles “Governance: Who Designs, Who Pays and Who Owns the Risk?” and “Integration of HAZOP Actions into Design Life-Cycle & Traceability” develop the perspective further.

DSIB provides an independent technical and design-safety review at FEED completion and handover phase (or before your EPC tender). We look across disciplines and deliverables to identify issues that conventional completion checks may leave behind.

Our review focuses on:

• Unresolved or weakly defined design decisions
• Consistency between philosophy documents and deliverables
• Status of HAZID, HAZOP, constructibility and design review concerns
• Safety Critical Elements and further critical design requirements
• Hidden assumptions, non-conformities, holds and technical deviations
• Lessons learned that the EPC team can actually benefit from
• Risks transferred implicitly into detailed engineering
• Design change log with wider safety or cost implications (including violations of MoC principles)
• Debates between contractor, owner, vendor and licensors
• Gaps between FEED maturity and actual EPC needs

The value is not another layer of document checking, but an independent view of whether the design basis, key decisions and risk controls are mature enough for EPC execution. We challenge closure evidence and assess potential remediation, rework and cost implications. The same review discipline applies at the project’s other gates — concept close-out, detail-design freeze, and readiness for commissioning and start-up — at the depth each gate requires.

DSIB’s Solutions Series articles “Multi-Disciplinary FEED Safety Endorsement Before Your EPC Bid” and “Maintaining SIS Integrity from Owner Acceptance through Operation” develop the perspective further.

Safe design is planned before it is engineered. On a mid-size unit, the FEED and detail-design phases carry dozens of safety-related activities across disciplines, vendors and licensors — and they deliver only if someone plans them against the design’s own sequence.

DSIB runs this planning as an executive activity from the earliest project stages:

• Identification of the required safety-in-design activities, with the specifications, procedures and standards each will follow, and a detailed safety-deliverables list proposed for the project’s character, scope and stage objectives
• QA/QC and safety-review planning timed to the design’s predecessor–successor logic, so each study lands when the design can still absorb it
• Advisory opinion on scope and schedule changes through the project; third-party workshops and specialist involvement proposed where the scope warrants
• Responsibility allocation across the responsible disciplines and between owner, contractor, vendors and licensors
• Consolidation of all risk-related registers, with defined information flow and a communication plan into the project risk register and the enterprise risk register
• Competence assessment of subcontractors and vendors; resource assessment and man-hour estimates for the work to be executed

Particularly for Safety Critical Elements, DSIB establishes a project-specific, standard-anchored SCE identification procedure and its associated performance standards, then follows a Technical Integrity Verification (TIV) process on the client’s behalf, aligned with the project’s QA/QC and engineering verification processes — a scope that opens at FEED and closes at commissioning with a multi-disciplinary PSSR.

Supervision of contractor work, technical comment and checking carried out on the owner’s behalf run as a separate Owner Engineering scope; under the engagement model, Owner Engineering can also carry the services above.

DSIB’s Solutions Series article “Management of SIS Lifecycle During Conceptual Design / FEED and Detailed Engineering” develops the perspective further.

DSIB provides the full range of SIS lifecycle services. Under this advisory theme the work is managerial: Re-establishing ownership at acceptance, making the FSM plan the document that actually governs operation, keeping the evidence base ready for a Functional Safety Assessment, and defining how SIS performance is read at management level. On the alarm side, DSIB establishes the philosophy, the rationalization governance and the performance assessment and monitoring framework, as well as the interdisciplinary design requirements, that keep the operator’s alarm load reasonable.

DSIB’s Solutions Series article “Maintaining SIS Integrity from Owner Acceptance through Operation” develops the perspective further.

Across the facility’s routine engineering workflow, safety-related studies produce a steady stream of decisions: Recommendations are raised, value-engineering opportunities are offered, gate-pass safety reviews open critical questions to discussion. Because any omission — an overlooked or underrated issue — can carry major accident relevance, a reinforcing assurance mechanism is needed above that routine. An MAH management framework provides it, and DSIB builds it with two references in hand: BEKRA and Seveso III as the legal floor, and the corporate MAH regimes global operators have refined over decades as the benchmark. The work runs through:

• Development of the MAH management strategy and framework: Report lifecycle needs across design, operation and decommissioning, duty-holder ownership, update triggers and acceptance gates, governance and authorization schemes, and the MAH risk register as the communication backbone between all parties
• Performance standards for MAH critical elements across design, construction and operation, consolidated with the client’s QA/QC and engineering verification processes
• Establishment of the functional safety management programme
• Risk Based Process Safety management system (RBPSMS): Maturity assessment, implementation, and day-to-day performance monitoring support
• Programme-level Risk-Based Inspection (RBI) advisory: Readiness and gap assessment, alignment of methodology and risk criteria with recognized industry frameworks, and periodic assessment of programme performance — detailed analysis executed with mechanical integrity specialist and technology partners where the scope requires
• Safety Report development and review support (BEKRA in Türkiye, Seveso III in the EU)

For engineering companies running many projects at once, DSIB delivers an independent assessment that reads design-safety and technical-risk evidence together with quality, productivity and management performance, on a holistic KPI and KRI monitoring framework:

• Evidence streams read together: Project controls, the quality management system, and design-safety and assurance records, interpreted through a technical-risk and design-safety lens
• Recurrence tested across projects, offices and business lines — showing whether a weakness is project-specific, recurring, concentrated, or significant enough for company-level attention
• An escalation test that moves only exposures with sufficient reach or consequence into the enterprise risk register, with a traceable line back to the originating projects and evidence
• A productivity reading of how man-hours, design-safety staff and software convert into usable design-safety outcomes
• Two reports, two purposes: A full report for the teams who will implement, and an executive brief for those who will decide

As handover approaches, the same assessment gives asset owners a clearer view of how design-safety risks have been managed.

DSIB’s Solutions Series article “Operational Excellence: The Design Safety Chapter” develops the perspective further.

Design and operations safety work produces indicators with enterprise significance — legal exposure, major accident scenarios, safety decisions that turn into costly revisions. Whether that signal reaches the corporate risk register at the right time, in the right detail, depends on how mature the organization’s ERM capability is.

DSIB assesses this maturity across eight dimensions of the risk management capability; the assessment produces a direct score for each dimension and for the organization overall, and the engagement closes with an executive report.