Our Approach
Our approach to risk management and process safety is applicable across a range of industries. We combine our knowledge and experience in risk assessments and process safety with your unique application. By collaborating with your team, we can bring a wide range of perspectives together from all levels of an operation to create an accurate picture of the risks in your process. From there, risks can be effectively identified, categorized, and managed.
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Wood products manufacturing
Serving the Canadian biomass industry
Forest products manufacturing uses complex machinery and equipment and involves hazards like mobile equipment and combustible dust, which can lead to incidents that pose a risk to people, property and business operations.
Obex Risk takes a hands-on approach to help you manage these hazards. From your raw material handling through your processing equipment, like dryers, to your finished product storage, we help you identify your hazards and stay in control of your process.
The result: a clear picture of your risk that acts as a roadmap to help you reduce incidents, avoid downtime, and make sure everyone goes home safely.
Manufacturing and production
The power of safety.
Your manufacturing facility has numerous pressures and competing priorities - reducing production costs, saving energy, improving efficiency and reducing delivery times. However, you’re uncompromising on safety, and it is a core value, not only a priority. While being faced with challenges from production defects to waste management to managing hazardous chemicals, you need a clear picture of your risk management strategies in order to maintain control over your process and operate safely.
Partnering with you, Obex Risk can provide bow tie analyses to manage risks from both the safety and production sides of your operation. Our approach will help you find solutions to improve in areas such as worker safety and ergonomic performance as well as process reliability and quality performance. Obex Risk can work with a broad range of manufacturing facilities, including metalworking, pharmaceutical, natural health products and food and beverage, just to name a few.
The result for your organization is innovation, reliability and continuous improvement - all built upon safer, lower risk operations.
Food production &
food safety
From farm to table - ensuring food safety throughout the supply chain
Food safety is critical for protecting consumers from undeclared allergens, exposures to chemicals, extraneous materials and microbiological hazards. HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) is an effective management system for addressing these food safety concerns.
Bow tie analysis by Obex Risk provides a simple visualization of HACCP which structures the sources of threats and the potential consequences. It clearly outlines the barriers that are in place to protect against them and the activities that must be performed in order for different barriers to function effectively.
Obex Risk can support food safety at any point in the supply chain, from raw material sourcing at the farm, to transportation, processing and packaging, distribution, retailers and ultimately the consumer. The result is a systematic and easy-to-understand risk management system that prevents consequences like ingredient or product waste, product recalls, harm to at-risk consumers and legal implications. Obex Risk can help you protect your market share, brand reputation and consumer confidence.
Learn more about how bow tie analysis can support food safety
Craft breweries and distilleries
Over 60 craft breweries and distilleries across every region of beautiful Nova Scotia
Craft brewing and distilling presents numerous hazards, including noise, heat, heavy lifting, confined spaces, carbon dioxide and other chemicals in the brewing process and cleaning tanks. These hazards need to be effectively managed in an easily understandable way to protect personnel, your facility and to prevent any production interruptions.
Obex Risk will work with you to systematically identify the hazards, and assess and control the risks. Protecting your employees and your process is an ongoing effort. Bow tie analysis provided by Obex Risk helps you to monitor your barriers and improve ineffective controls and streamline your safety programs, including hearing conservation, compressed gas safety, respiratory protection and ergonomics.
Obex Risk supports you in your commitment to health and safety, while improving efficiency and enhancing customer service, and ultimately protecting what is at the centre of it all - people.
Healthcare
Risk-based strategies to improve patient safety
From communicable diseases to medication dispensing to infections, healthcare relies on numerous controls to protect against adverse events with the potential to negatively impact the health and safety of patients. Effective safety measures need to be identified and managed. Obex Risk uses a systematic approach to the assessment of these complex risk management strategies and provides a visual overview of risk, making it easier to explain and communicate to others.
The result is an improved understanding of hazard prevention and mitigation needed for safer processes in clinical settings.
Read more about how bow tie analysis can be applied to healthcare, like COVID-19 risk reduction and other healthcare settings here
Laboratories
Improved communication and visualization of complex incident scenarios
Research and development laboratories present unique hazards, including the use of new cutting-edge equipment, high-temperature processes, lasers and compressed gases, as well as the storage, handling and disposal of toxic and flammable chemicals, combustible dusts and powders. Remember that low volumes and frequencies of these hazards don’t make laboratories immune to these risks. These operational risks need to be identified and managed for personal and process safety to protect personnel, your laboratory and prevent delays in research deliverables and milestones.
Obex Risk will work with you to perform a bow tie analysis, providing you with a thorough and systematic assessment of these hazards and your controls to manage these risks. This simple visual tool will allow you to easily communicate risk to a broad range of personnel and audiences, promoting a strong safety culture and enhancing stakeholder buy-in. Obex Risk will help support communication to stakeholders to identify corrective actions and implement solutions. Obex Risk will also help you to be more adaptable and agile to management of change in your state-of-the-art facility, be it with respect to equipment, chemicals, processes or personnel.
The result is simplified risk management for your facility, allowing your team to focus on performing the research that will shape tomorrow.
Enterprise risk management
Identify weak spots in business operations
Your business’ enterprise risk management (ERM) framework allows you to be proactive to improve organisational performance, protect assets and create value for stakeholders. Risks, including those related to the marketplace, your infrastructure and your reputation, must be effectively managed in order to protect your organization's objectives, while minimizing cost and improving quality. Obex Risk can work with you and your ERM team to develop a bow tie that supports your framework with an intuitive tool that provides your organization a holistic view on risk. The result is an easy to use tool that communicates key risks and evaluates the control you have over those risks and your response plans. This systematic approach can decrease your organization’s vulnerability and improve the understanding of how individual actions and events can impact the organization.