Safe design of work equipment: proposal of two approaches for taking practices into account

Safe design of work equipment is a regulatory obligation. To be effective, this concept of “safety by design” needs to be based on an overall vision of “working situations”.
In order to address this issue, INRS is proposing two complementary approaches based on FNA (Functional Needs Analysis) and on FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis).
The first approach, relating to specifying the needs, proposes an intuitive mode of questioning (Who, What, Where, When, How, Why, How Much, How Many), in order to bring the “client-designer” pair to define the criteria for using each function.
Following on from FNA, Process FMECA is used in designing or altering production equipment. The approach proposed here encourages designers to create or to preserve the “margin of manoeuvre" necessary for the operators to do their work. This change consists in broadening the scope of analysis so that, for each function, questions are asked about the technical solutions being considered in the light of real practices and of variability in such practices.