Your Safety Case Should Outlive Your Software Vendor

Excel-Powered Portability

Deploying enterprise safety software usually requires months of IT provisioning, complex database setups, and cloud infrastructure. SAFOPS takes a radically different approach: the entire underlying database is a single, structured Excel file.

If SAFOPS Disappeared Tomorrow

It is a fair question to ask a small supplier, and in defence, nuclear and rail it is usually the first one procurement asks. Most safety tools answer it badly: your hazard data sits inside a vendor database or a hosted tenancy, so the life of your safety case is tied to the life of the company that sold it to you.

SAFOPS is built so that the answer is boring. Hazards, barriers, initiating events, claims, evidence references and the tamper-evident audit chain all live in documented sheets of an ordinary .xlsx workbook. Your engineers can open it in Excel, read it, edit it and defend it in front of a regulator with no SAFOPS licence, no SAFOPS install, and no permission from us.

To be precise about what survives, and in which circumstance: there are three layers, and most buyers only ask about the middle one.

• If you hold a perpetual licence — everything. An installed instance has no activation step, no runtime licence check and no expiry, so it keeps running indefinitely on an isolated network. The computation carries on with it: the PFD/PFH ladders, the change-impact analysis, the residual arithmetic. Nothing about our continued existence is load-bearing. See the licensing terms.
• If you only have the files — the safety case. Hazards, barriers, claims, evidence references and the audit chain stay readable and editable in Excel by anyone, with no licence at all. What a workbook cannot carry is the computation.
• If you need the engine guaranteed — escrow. The source itself, released to you by a third party if the company ceases to trade.

Software Escrow, on Request

Taking that third layer in turn: for programmes where the engine matters as much as the data, SAFOPS can be supplied under a source code escrow agreement with an established UK escrow agent. If the company ceases to trade, your organisation receives the codebase and can build and run it internally. Between the open workbook and the escrow deed, there is no state of the world in which your safety case becomes unreadable or unmaintainable. Ask for it during procurement.

Share Dynamic Fault Groups Instantly

Because your safety case data is completely self-contained in a `.xlsx` file, sharing is effortless. You can share entire dynamic fault groups with stakeholders, back up data onto encrypted USB drives, or check the database directly into version control—all without requiring the recipient to have any special software installed.