

ISO 31000 provides organizations with guidance to develop an effective risk management strategy. Standards such as ISO and ICH Q9, are emphasizing a renewed focus on proactive risk management to improve quality performance. Therefore, implementing a risk-based approach to quality & safety management has become key to maintaining a competitive advantage and mitigating the risks triggered by these factors. A company is vulnerable to several risks such as supplier relationships, disruption of the supply chain, manufacturing processes, employee safety, shipment of finished products, environmental incidents, and more.Īdditionally, companies also have to deal with political and regulatory risks.
#RISK PROBABILITY AND IMPACT MATRIX HOW TO#
Learn more about reducing risk in your company with our free guidebook on How to Define a Risk Management Strategy.The risks that impact today’s enterprises are continuously increasing, changing, and becoming complex and interconnected. With these pieces in place, the results are very powerful, helping standardize your decisions and providing quantitative justification for them. For true effectiveness, you need people on the other end interpreting the results, asking questions and vetting your risk matrix by testing it against historical data. It’s important to remember the risk matrix is just a tool, not a solution. Your FSMS automatically feeds the information into your hazard analysis so you can record your decision. Since serious illness could occur and the situation is rated an 8, you will need an extra CCP.


Based on how the scales were plotted, you can see high risk at top left and low risk at bottom right. Let’s say internal policies dictate that anything receiving a risk rating of 1-10 needs a CCP. In this case, you’ve set up your Food Safety Management System (FSMS) to use a weighted scale rather than straight multiplication, with lower numbers representing a higher risk. Here we’ll use an example of a pathogenic hazard at a step where you’re trying to decide whether you need another Critical Control Point (CCP) . You decide wisely to focus your efforts on Supplier B. This could be because Supplier B’s product plays a strategic role in your process or consumer safety, while Supplier A’s incidents have an overall negligible impact. Your Quality Management System calculates each supplier’s risk for you, showing that Supplier A has more incidents than Supplier B but actually poses less risk. Let’s say a supplier failure recently caused a problem at your company, and you’ve been tasked with identifying high-risk suppliers who need improvement (or who need to go altogether). You think it’s likely some leakage may occur, and if it leaked you could end up killing off a population of endangered salamanders that live there.Īutomated risk assessment tools in your compliance or EHS Management System tell you this borders on unacceptable risk, so you decide to move forward with additional controls.Ģ. The pipeline has had multiple maintenance issues, and it’s located next to a regulated stream. Let’s say your company is trying to determine whether you need additional risk controls to prevent leakage of waste during transport via pipeline to a storage location. There’s a lot of variability in how to use a risk matrix, so here’s a quick look at some examples. For example, it would be difficult to justify spending $2 million to prevent an ergonomic injury, whereas it would be worth it to prevent a chemical explosion. Moderate risk which may or may not be acceptable (yellow)ĭeciding whether risk is acceptable or not often comes down to a cost/benefit calculation.High risk that’s considered unacceptable (red).Low risk that’s considered acceptable (green).The quantified risk falls into one of three zones: The risk matrix then plots these variables in a color-coded chart to show overall risk for different situations: Levels of probability and impact can be broken up into verbal and numerical scales like so: In simple terms, risk assessment is defined as the probability of an event multiplied by its impact. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to create a probability and impact matrix that can identify exactly where best to manage risk.Ī risk matrix helps you do both, calculating risk across various outcomes to give you clear guidelines on whether risk is acceptable or unacceptable. Once that decision is made, then the next step is arguably to integrate a risk matrix. One, you need a way to quantify risk to make the best choice, and two, you need to be able to explain that choice. Two things are true when it comes to making important decisions that impact your company.
