Bow-Tie Risk Analysis for Process Safety
A HAZOP report and a QRA study both hold enormous amounts of safety-critical information — and both are nearly impossible to explain to a plant manager, a new operator, or an auditor in five minutes. A bow-tie diagram solves that problem by putting the whole risk picture on a single page: what could trigger an incident, what stops it, and what happens if those barriers fail. Burraq Consulting’s course trains participants to build bow-ties that are genuinely useful, not just decorative.
What Is Bow-Tie Risk Analysis?
A bow-tie diagram is a visual risk management tool that combines a fault tree (the threats leading to a top event) with an event tree (the consequences that follow from it), joined at a central “knot” representing the loss of control event. Preventive barriers sit on the left side, stopping threats from causing the top event; mitigative barriers sit on the right, limiting the consequences if it happens anyway. Escalation factors show what could cause a barrier itself to fail.
Who Should Attend
- Safety engineers and risk managers responsible for major accident hazard communication
- Asset integrity engineers who own or maintain safety-critical barriers
- HSE professionals who need to explain risk to non-technical stakeholders and new personnel
- Engineers looking to turn existing HAZOP or QRA findings into a clearer risk picture
Prerequisites
A basic understanding of risk assessment concepts is recommended; prior exposure to HAZOP is helpful since bow-ties are often built from HAZOP findings, but not required.
What the Course Covers
- Bow-tie structure — threats, the top event, consequences, barriers, and escalation factors
- Building a bow-tie from existing HAZOP or QRA outputs, rather than starting from a blank page
- Identifying and rating preventive and mitigative barriers, including the difference between hardware, procedural, and human barriers
- Barrier health and performance standards, and how bow-ties connect to a facility's maintenance and inspection programs
- Using bow-ties for major accident hazard communication and workforce training, where their visual format does the most good
- An overview of common bow-tie software tools used across the industry
- A hands-on workshop building a complete bow-tie diagram for a realistic process safety scenario
Course at a Glance
Why Train with Burraq Consulting
Many bow-tie training courses hand out a generic template and call it a day. Burraq’s instructors build the workshop bow-tie from a realistic regional scenario, so participants leave having practiced the judgment calls that matter most — rating a barrier honestly instead of listing every safeguard on paper, and connecting escalation factors back to real maintenance and inspection gaps.
Certification and Next Steps
This course builds practical bow-tie construction and barrier management skills. It’s a natural companion to Burraq’s HAZOP Facilitation and Quantitative Risk Assessment courses, since bow-ties are most useful when built directly from those studies’ findings.
Frequently Asked Questions
A HAZOP study is a detailed, systematic technique for identifying process deviations node by node. A bow-tie takes specific major accident hazard scenarios — often drawn from HAZOP findings — and presents them visually, showing barriers and escalation factors on a single diagram.
No. Bow-ties are a qualitative communication and barrier-management tool, not a substitute for the numerical probability and consequence analysis a QRA provides. Many facilities use both together.
Ownership usually sits with process safety or risk management teams, but barrier owners across operations, maintenance, and engineering need to stay engaged since they’re responsible for keeping individual barriers effective.
Several commercial bow-tie software packages are used across the industry; this course focuses on the underlying methodology so the skills transfer regardless of which tool your organization adopts.
Put your risk picture on one page everyone can understand.
or contact us to arrange an in-house workshop for your team.