System safety for plant safety specialists

System safety, while probably deserving the reputation for being a complicated way of resolving safeness questions (and therefore not very useful to manufacturing plant safety specialists), does not have to be that way. Certainly, because of having a good conceptual base, it can be used for evaluating the safeness of extremely complex systems. Much of what is published describes that use. This article intends to describe a simple version which identifies and conclusively and realistically answer the significant questions about safeness. What follows will show how this can be done by a typical plant safety specialist, whatever that person's background is. The article approaches the task by first describing system safety, gives some background so that the readers can relate it to their own knowledge of system safety, describes the fundamentals, shows how to make an analysis, gives examples, then closes with a summary.