From events to insights: revealing hidden risk patterns with CaNeTA
- Tracey Pearce-Sampson
- Oct 30
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 5
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Every maintenance failure, safety near miss, or production delay tells a connected story.
Traditional risk registers treat each event in isolation, missing hidden dependencies.
CaNeTA (Causal Network Topology Analysis) uncovers these relationships to expose early warning signals.
By connecting operational, maintenance, and safety data, organisations can move from reactive to predictive risk management.
Every organisation captures hundreds of events each day, yet these events are often analysed in isolation, leaving the broader risk landscape unseen.
Examples of these events include:
sensor alerts
maintenance work orders
incident reports
workplace near-misses.
In this article we explore how Causal Network Topology Analysis (CaNeTA) connects the dots between events to reveal hidden cause-and-effect structures in your operations. CaNeTA can show how these patterns can provide early warnings across maintenance, production, and safety systems - long before issues escalate into critical failures or serious incidents.
The problem with traditional risk management
Traditional risk management focuses on listing hazards and controls, not the interactions between them.
When a breakdown, process deviation, or safety event occurs, it’s treated as a one-off problem. The result? Hidden vulnerabilities persist, and organisations remain reactive.
Example 1: | Example 2: |
A recurring pump seal failure might seem like an isolated maintenance issue, but in reality, it’s linked to upstream process variations and downstream production losses. | A “minor” safety event could be the final symptom of a long-developing operational imbalance. |
Research across process safety and reliability management consistently shows that major industrial incidents are often preceded by multiple early indicators scattered across different systems - signals that could have revealed vulnerabilities earlier if connected and analysed holistically.
Frameworks such as the OSHA Leading Indicator Program and the CCPS (Center for Chemical Process Safety) Process Safety Metrics Guidelines highlight that nearly all serious events are preceded by precursors or near misses that go unnoticed due to fragmented data and siloed systems.
Fragmentation of data disguises true system behaviour and that’s where CaNeTA offers a breakthrough:
1. See risk as a network, not a list
CaNeTA transforms traditional risk registers into living networks of causes, consequences, and controls. Each event, whether it’s from a maintenance log, delay report, or ICAM investigation, it becomes a node in a causal graph.
Connections between nodes reveal how one event influences another, exposing high-risk junctions and propagation paths that would otherwise stay hidden.
2. Predicting issues before they escalate
Using network metrics such as betweenness, closeness and eigenvector centrality, CaNeTA identifies where events converge - the “pressure points” that signal potential failure propagation.
These insights make it possible to detect early warning patterns, such as:
Rising frequency of related equipment alarms before a critical breakdown.
Shifts in operator behaviour indicating a latent safety hazard.
Production delays clustering around a particular control point, hinting at systemic inefficiency.
In short, CaNeTA helps you see tomorrow’s risks today.
3. Bridging maintenance, operations, and safety
While most analytics systems stay siloed - focusing on uptime, throughput, or injury rates separately, CaNeTA integrates them.
Detect emerging failure modes by mapping causal chains between work orders and sensor anomalies. | |
Identify process bottlenecks and cascading effects across shifts and systems. | |
Trace near misses back to their operational precursors, revealing where control degradation begins. |
By viewing these dimensions together, organisations gain a holistic picture of operational risk, not just symptoms but structure.
4. From insight to action
CaNeTA visualisations show where interventions will have the greatest system-wide effect. Instead of spreading resources thinly across all risks, you can target the bridges and hubs most responsible for incident or event propagation. This creates a defensible, data-driven way to prioritise corrective actions and justify investment in critical controls.
Every business event is part of a story. On their own, they speak in whispers - a failed bearing here, a late inspection there. But when connected through CaNeTA, they form a clear narrative about where your organisation is most vulnerable and where it can improve.
By integrating your maintenance, production, and safety data into a single causal framework, you can shift from reactive firefighting to predictive foresight - seeing risk as a living, evolving network.
Are you ready to let your data tell the full story of your risk profile?
Join us at our upcoming 'Solving Safety and Risk Challenges' event in Brisbane, Qld (17th November 2025), where an expert panel will showcase how CaNeTA fused with AI innovations are setting new standards globally for risk management, legislative compliance, hazard identification, and continuous safety improvement.
Sources:
OSHA (2023) – Using Leading Indicators to Improve Safety and Health Outcomes
Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) – Process Safety Leading and Lagging Metrics – You Don’t Improve What You Don’t Measure (AIChE, 2019)
National Academies Press (2011) – Accident Precursor Analysis and Management: Reducing Technological Risk Through Diligence
Hopkins, A. (2009) – Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster
