Frequently Asked Questions on Barrier Management

Barrier management is the practice of identifying, monitoring, and maintaining the technical and human safeguards, called barriers, that prevent a hazard from turning into a major accident.

A bowtie diagram often written as “bow tie diagram” is a visual risk model that maps out how a specific hazard could lead to a major accident. On one side, it shows the threats that could trigger a top event; on the other, the consequences if it is not stopped. The barriers sit in the middle as the preventive and mitigating controls standing between threat and consequence.

A bowtie diagram is a powerful tool for communicating how major accident hazards are controlled. Its simple, easy-to-understand visualisation shows the causes and events that could lead to an accident, as well as the preventive and mitigating controls that limit the consequences. This makes it an effective risk communication tool for non-experts, the workforce, engineers, and managers. (Bow Ties in Risk Management, A concept book for Process Safety, 2018)

Presight Barrier Management incorporates its own bowtie workbench-based approach, but can also integrate with other bowtie tools. In addition to being a communication tool, Presight Barrier Management is a monitoring system that is developed to give close-to-real-time monitoring of the barrier conditions using bowties as the basis.  In other words, Presight Barrier Management keeps the risk picture accurate day to day, using live operational data instead of static workshop output.

Read more here on what a bowtie diagram is: What is a bowtie model and why use it for risk management

In most high-risk industries, yes, although the specific language varies. Regulators generally require operators to identify major hazards, put controls in place, demonstrate that those controls are effective, and maintain that demonstration over time.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) recommends practices 96, 65-2 and 90, while UK Health and Safety gives guidelines on safety management for major hazard industries.

Followed by COMAH Competent Authority that extends to support assessment of major environmental accidents, which means that many COMAH sites in the UK have included bow ties in their reports. In addition to these, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) in Australia, International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC) and the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers also have a barrier-approached focus.

Norway is the most explicit, writing barriers directly into its management regulations for the petroleum sector in addition to conducting audits based on barrier management.

A bowtie model helps you design and visualise your risk model, including hazards, threats, top events, barriers, and consequences. Presight Barrier management software takes that model and keeps it alive. It connects the bowtie to real operational data so that barrier status is continuously monitored, degradation is visible as it develops, and the risk picture updates automatically rather than reflecting the last time someone ran a workshop. The bowtie becomes an operational tool, not a document.

Barrier management applies wherever a or unwanted events are a credible risk. Presight is used across mining, agriculture, maritime, rail and transportation, chemical and process industries, aviation, and oil and gas. The core question is the same in every sector: do you have safety-critical barriers whose degradation needs to be visible before it becomes an incident? If yes, the platform is relevant regardless of industry.

Yes. The platform is configured to your organisation’s terminology, risk categories, barrier taxonomy, and performance criteria. It does not impose oil and gas conventions. Whether you are managing barriers on a mine site, a vessel, a chemical plant, a rail network, or an agricultural operation, the structure adapts to your context.

General EHS platforms cover a broad range of functions, including incident management, audits, and compliance tracking. As a result, barrier status may be treated as just one module among many rather than the platform’s core purpose. If your specific gap is real-time visibility into barrier degradation, cumulative risk monitoring, and bowtie-linked status that updates automatically from operational systems, a purpose-built platform offers deeper capabilities in that area without disrupting how your teams use their existing systems for everything else.

Unlike specialist risk assessment methods such as QRA, LOPA, FTA, and ETA, which serve different purposes, the bowtie method makes risk clear to a broad range of users and can increase risk awareness across operations.

Most barrier management platforms differ on three things: whether barrier status updates automatically from operational systems or relies on manual input; whether they cover human and organisational barriers alongside technical ones, or only equipment; and whether the bowtie is a static design document or connected to live operational data.

Presight automates data collection from systems such as maintenance systems (CMMS), alarm systems, permit-to-work, competency records and more. It covers technical, human, and organisational barriers, giving a complete risk picture. The bowtie is linked directly to live barrier status, so it reflects what is happening in the operation rather than what was documented in the last workshop.

Presight aggregates barrier-status data from multiple third-party sources into a single, consolidated status. This status can reveal changes in risk levels and allows users to drill down to identify the cause of a degraded barrier, such as overdue equipment maintenance.

The platform identifies compound and cascading conditions that affect the same scenario or asset group. It detects combinations of simultaneous impairments, overdue actions, overrides, and abnormal operating states. These combinations are often invisible when barrier status is managed in separate systems or spreadsheets. Presight surfaces them as a combined risk picture and can alert the right people before the situation escalates.

Yes. Technical barriers such as equipment, instrumented systems, physical controls are one part of the picture. However, Presight also covers human barriers such as operator competency and procedural compliance, and organisational barriers such as permit-to-work status, training currency, and management of change. Barrier health calculations can draw on data from HR and competency systems alongside maintenance and process data..

Yes. Dashboards and workspaces are configured by role; for example, operations, maintenance, HSE, technical authorities, and leadership each see what is relevant to their responsibilities without working from the same undifferentiated view. Access to sensitive data, such as individual competency records, can be restricted by role. The same underlying risk information is available to everyone who needs it, presented at the level of detail appropriate to their function.

Presight also keeps an activity log that helps maintain transparency and accountability. This is restricted to Presight users.  

The platform is designed for organisations managing safety-critical operations where a major accident is a credible risk. It scales from a single complex facility to enterprise-wide deployment across multiple sites, organisational units, and asset types. There is no limit on the number of barriers or bowties that can be monitored simultaneously, and the architecture supports deployment across geographically distributed operations.

Yes. If you have documented performance standards, barrier strategies, or bowties, even in spreadsheets, you have enough to start. Existing documentation is imported into the platform and used as the starting point rather than rebuilt from scratch. The first asset typically requires the most configuration time, but templates accelerate deployment across additional assets. Part of the value is turning documentation that already exists into something that is actively monitored, connected to operational data, and visible to the right people.

Design documentation such as bowties, barrier, emergency preparedness plans, training and drills, and performance standards, plus live data from maintenance systems (CMMS), HR systems, deviation systems, and permit-to-work systems are either connected directly or via a data lake.

Yes. Dedicated users or user groups, such as management, can override barrier status where needed, so the risk picture stays accurate and defensible even in situations the automated feeds do not fully capture.

 The platform can automatically send e-mail notifications when a barrier failure is detected.

Both are supported. The Bowtie Workbench lets your team build bowties from scratch or with AI assistance. Consulting support is also available for teams that want expert input during the building process.

The platform is cloud-based, but an on-premises or hybrid deployment is also available.

Yes. The user interface can be configured to support additional languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, or others for both end users and administrators. Specific language requirements are confirmed during scoping and addressed as part of the implementation agreement.

Yes. BowTieXP files, for example, are exported to Excel, and then we import these to our Presight Barrier Management including labels, metadata, and element relationships. Presight regularly migrates customers’ existing BowTieXP libraries. You do not need to rebuild your bowtie models from scratch.

The first asset typically requires more time to set up, as the platform is configured and mapped to that specific asset. Templates are then used to accelerate implementation across additional assets, and existing performance standards and barrier strategy documentation are used as the starting point rather than rebuilt.

Bowties, barrier strategies, and performance standards from your existing design documentation are imported into the platform rather than requiring a rebuild from a blank page.

Historical data can be migrated into the platform as part of implementation. The approach depends on the format and quality of your existing data, and is scoped during the implementation process. Data retained in legacy systems remains accessible in those systems and does not need to be abandoned.

The timeline depends on the quality of the existing data and access to that data, as well as the level of organisational commitment to the programme. Implementation typically takes between three and nine months. A phased approach that starts with a defined pilot scope and expands from there is the most common and lowest-risk path.

Visibility itself changes behaviour. Automated notifications flag degraded barriers and prompt action in advance, rather than discovery during an audit or after an incident. Role-based dashboards ensure the people who can act on a specific barrier see its status and not just a central HSE team. And connecting barrier status to live operational data means degradation is caught as it develops, not reconstructed afterwards.

Both, and they reinforce each other. Fewer degraded-barrier surprises reduce the risk of unplanned downtime as well as incident risk. Consolidating what would otherwise be manual, multi-system reporting into one view also reduces the person-hours spent assembling a risk picture for meetings, audits, and shift handovers.

Barrier management software is more like insurance than an efficiency software. Its value lies primarily in what it reveals when something goes wrong, rather than in the administrative time it saves. You buy it so that on the day a barrier starts to degrade, someone sees it and knows what it means, instead of a barrier failure only becoming clear during the investigation afterwards. That is genuinely difficult to reduce to a single return on investment figure, in the same way it is difficult to price what a fire alarm saves you.

There is also a real efficiency case underneath that: less time spent manually assembling barrier status from disconnected systems for reporting, audits, and shift handover. That part can be modelled with real numbers once you know how much time your teams currently spend on it.

The main components are the initial implementation and software license or subscription. The actual figures depend on the number of assets, the data sources connected, and the level of service agreement in place. These are scoped during a discovery conversation rather than priced on a standard list, because the right answer varies significantly between a single-site operator and a multi-asset enterprise deployment.