Author(s)

Annick Melanson, Sylvie Nadeau

Department of Mechanical Engineering, école de technologiesupérieure, Montreal, Canada.

Manufacturing businesses today have become complex sociotechnical systems. They must manage a variety of risks, including those related to occupational health and safety and emergent ones. In this article, we examine the possibility of using resilience engineering to provide a framework for the management of OHS and emergent risks in manufacturing businesses. More specifically, we compare failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA) to functional resonance analysis method (FRAM), the former being an established risk analysis method in the manufacturing sector and the latter being a relatively novel method used primarily in high-risk sectors such as air transportation, hospitals and railways. These two methods differ in several respects, but comparison reveals their relative advantages as well as their complementarity. Our principal finding confirms the advantages of the functional resonance analysis method in risk management for complex systems. Although failure mode effect and criticality analysis is more effective for understanding technical risks, functional resonance analysis method provides better understanding of the system as a whole and allows more efficient management of organizational risks as well as risks associated with the variability of human performance.

Resilience Engineering, Functional Resonance Analysis Method, Risk Assessment, Manufacturing Environment

Melanson, A. and Nadeau, S. (2019) Resilience Engineering for Sustainable Prevention in the Manufacturing Sector: A Comparative Study of Two Methods of Risk Analysis. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, 9, 267-281. doi: 10.4236/ajibm.2019.91017.