This book explains what SIL and functional safety means in a nutshell. The book is intended for everybody new to functional safety and SIL and wants a complete overview without being lost in the details.

It is excellent for managers who need to quickly understand what functional safety is all about and how it will influence their employees' work and their products and/or services. It is excellent for engineers and professionals that want to get started with functional safety and understand the big picture before going into detail.

Many standards, guidelines and other publications exist that talk about functional safety. All of them with their own level of detail.

This book does not detail what has to be done according to what standard and whatnot. It explains the main functional safety concepts to know everything you need to know to get started.

Functional safety is not rocket science. Once you understand it and apply it a few times in practice, you will notice it is good engineering practice.

This book tries to explain these good engineering practices. Functional safety standards can be confusing and contradicting at times, and sometimes they require things that make no sense.

You do not need to understand the standards to apply and be good at functional safety. Suppose you know the concepts explained in this book.

In that case, you can apply functional safety to your organisation and your products, with or without following the exact requirements of the standards. Actually, once you understand how functional safety works, you most likely will go beyond what standards say and create your own functional safety organisation of excellence.

And if you do that, well, you are well on your way to becoming a longtime winner as opposed to a short-term fuse. .