An Internal Sparks Q&A with Jamie Kean, Functional Safety Engineer at Booth Welsh
When organisations think about safety, they often focus on the visible aspects: PPE, procedures and workforce safety. But behind many industrial processes sits another critical layer of protection, functional safety.
For more than two decades, Jamie Kean has helped clients by designing, assessing and maintaining systems that automatically respond when something goes wrong. We spoke to him about what Functional Safety really means, where organisations commonly struggle, and why the biggest challenge often comes long after a project has been completed.
Q: Let’s start with the basics. What is functional safety?
Jamie: Functional safety is essentially automated safety.
It’s about detecting a hazardous event within a process and ensuring the system automatically takes action to move the plant into a safe state.
For example, if pressure within a vessel exceeds safe operating limits, a functional safety system can detect that condition and trigger a response before the situation escalates.
The goal is simple: help our clients identify process risks and make sure the right safeguards are in place to protect people, assets and operations.
Q: When should functional safety be considered within a project?
Jamie: As early as possible.
Functional safety follows what’s known as a Safety Lifecycle, a structured process that runs from concept and design through to operation and maintenance.
The early stages focus on understanding hazards and assessing risk. Those findings are then translated into requirements that guide the engineering design and implementation.
When functional safety is considered from the outset, projects tend to run more smoothly. When it’s left too late, organisations can find themselves revisiting earlier decisions, introducing additional work and creating avoidable delays. Our engineers can support at any stage, but engaging with us early allows us to be proactive in assessing your functional safety needs.
A useful question for any project team is:
“Have we considered functional safety early enough?”
Q: What challenges are clients most commonly facing?
Jamie: It’s often less about technology and more about capability.
Many organisations don’t have dedicated functional safety specialists in-house, particularly when they’re introducing a new process, expanding operations or entering an unfamiliar area.
In those situations, they may need support developing procedures, understanding their responsibilities or navigating the requirements of the safety lifecycle. That’s where we come in.
Sometimes it’s about providing specialist expertise within a project team. Other times it’s about helping organisations build a framework that allows them to manage functional safety effectively in the future.
Q: How has the discipline changed over the last 20 years?
Jamie: It’s become much more mature.
When I first started working in functional safety, organisations often needed support simply because they weren’t familiar with the requirements.
Today, many operators, particularly those running facilities where operational hazards are frequently present, have a much stronger understanding of their responsibilities.
That doesn’t mean the challenges have disappeared, but the conversation has shifted. Clients are generally more informed and are looking for specialist expertise to support specific projects, assessments or ongoing improvements.
Our role has evolved with that. Increasingly, we are supporting clients not just with understanding functional safety, but with applying it consistently across the full safety lifecycle. That can include early hazard and risk assessment, Safety Requirements Specification development, design review, validation, Functional Safety Assessment, audit and long-term improvement planning.
Q: What makes Booth Welsh’s approach different?
Jamie: One of our strengths is being able to combine functional safety expertise with practical engineering delivery.
We can support the assessment and consultancy side of functional safety, but we also have the wider engineering capability to help implement solutions.
That means clients can access expertise across the full lifecycle, from identifying requirements through to delivering and supporting the systems that help manage risk.
For many organisations, having those capabilities working together creates a more joined-up approach to project delivery.
Q: What’s the biggest issue organisations aren’t talking about enough?
Jamie: What happens after the project ends.
Most organisations are reasonably good at considering functional safety during project delivery. The bigger concern is whether those systems continue to be reviewed, maintained and assessed years later.
Safety systems are often designed with specific assumptions and performance requirements. Over time, equipment ages, processes change and operational priorities shift.
That’s why ongoing reviews are so important.
Functional Safety Assessments and Functional Safety Audits help organisations confirm that systems are still operating as intended and continue to provide the level of protection they were originally designed to deliver.
A lot of attention is rightly given to implementing safety systems. Less attention is sometimes given to checking that they’re still effective years later.
Looking Beyond Compliance
Functional safety is often associated with standards, assessments and compliance requirements. But at its heart, it’s about something much simpler: making sure critical systems perform when they’re needed most.
Whether supporting a new project, assessing an existing system or reviewing long-term performance, the objective remains the same, reducing risk and creating safer, more reliable operations.
And while many organisations focus on getting functional safety right during project delivery, the real question may be:
When was the last time your safety systems were independently reviewed?