It’s an interesting fact that many end users and engineering companies that exida has talked to have not or do not undertake Functional Safety Assessments (FSAs). Why is this? Many do not realize and/or understand the true purpose of and benefit of performing FSAs. The IEC61511 standard identifies 5 FSAs that should be performed with two of them being mandatory. Still, even the mandatory ones are not being conducted when they should be. For example, I was asked by one end user if we could quote to perform an FSA 3 (one of the mandatory FSAs) almost 1 year after starting production! For those who don’t know, the FSA 3 should be conducted prior to startup and not afterwards. Therefore, what is the benefit of performing FSAs?