SLIKWORKS - modern tool for Functional Safety development

Why do we need modern tools for functional safety?

Product development in safety-critical industries such as automotive, aerospace, and robotics is no longer confined to a single team or location. Engineers, developers, and safety experts often work across different countries, time zones, and organizations. As of early 2025, safety engineering work has shifted to one that is increasingly hybrid, where 52% of such employees are working in a hybrid/remote manner. To function effectively in this environment, modern tools must support easy collaboration while remaining intuitive enough that users can get started with minimal training.

In addition to distributed development, safety-critical industries are increasingly driven by fast and continuous software development. Features changes updates are released at an unprecedented pace. As an example, Tesla is known to have issued 42 updates over-the-air to vehicles in 6 months (which is about 1 update every 4-5 days). Functional safety activities must be able to keep up with this speed. Static documents and rigid workflows slow teams down and introduce risk.

Safety-critical data is sensitive and often highly confidential. A famous example of a security breach, which was discovered during an audit of a car manufacturer, involved enabling "zero-day vulnerability" policy in a contractor’s publicly accessible application. By doing so, it was possible to gain control over the vehicle telematics system, compromising the safety of drivers and traffic participants. A modern safety engineering tool must therefore be secure by design, protecting information through mechanisms such as end-to-end encryption, strict access control, and continuous monitoring. Alignment with internationally recognized information security standards, such as ISO 27001, is essential to ensure that collaboration, speed, and intelligence do not come at the cost of security.

Driven by distributed development and the need for fast, continuous software delivery in safety-critical industries, teams are under pressure to move quickly. However, traditional functional safety activities still rely on rigid, waterfall-style workflows and static documents. As a result, these processes have become a major bottleneck. They slow teams down and even introduce additional risk. To resolve this disparity and keep pace with unprecedented feature update speeds, companies must adopt modern, AI-powered tools that can intelligently assist engineers in keeping complex designs and documentation accurately updated.

Introducing SLIKWORKS

SLIKWORKS is a modern, web-based platform designed specifically to help safety engineers perform complex safety analyses with greater speed, clarity, and confidence. Built for today’s fast-moving, software-driven industries, it replaces fragmented spreadsheets and rigid legacy tools with an intuitive, purpose-built environment focused on real engineering needs.

SLIKWORKS transforms how safety engineers create FMEAs and FMEDAs by automating the most time-intensive steps. Instead of spending 2-3 weeks manually building form sheets, engineers can now generate complete, structured analyses directly from architecture diagrams in about 1 hour. The tool eliminates repetitive setup work that slows traditional workflows, giving teams a fast, reliable starting point without the usual manual overhead.

Beyond automation, SLIKWORKS uses AI to intelligently support engineers throughout the analysis process. It can propose and refine failure modes, effects, causes, quantitative ratings, reducing iterative refinement cycles from 4-6 weeks down to 2-3 weeks. By streamlining documentation and guiding users through a clear, efficient workflow, SLIKWORKS frees engineers to focus on what matters most - designing safer, more reliable systems rather than managing spreadsheets.

SLIKWORKS demo

SLIKWORKS-supported safety analyses

1. FMEA - Failure Modes, Effects, and Analysis safety analyses in SLIKWORKS allows users to perform an end-to-end FMEA, given an item architecture.

2. (coming soon) FMEDA- Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analyses allows users to perform an FMEDA on an electric circuit to determine the PMHF (Probabilistic Metric of Hardware Failure), SPFM (Single Point Failure Metric), and LFM (Latent Failure Metric)

3. (coming soon) HAZOP - The HAZard and OPerability analyses in SLIKWORKS allows users to identify all the hazards from given functions using a set of guidewords

4. (coming soon) HARA- Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment enables users to identify risk, classify risk levels, and safety goals for the identified hazards

5. (coming soon) SOTIF using STPA (Systems Theoretic Process Analysis) - This allows users to identify limitations and triggering conditions in a system that can lead to safety critical issues

6. (coming soon) FTA - Fault Tree Analysis enables users to draw out a tree representing all the faults that can lead to violation of a hazard. The user can also calculate hardware metrics like PMHF (Probabilistic Metric of Hardware Failure), SPFM (Single Point Failure Metric), and LFM (Latent Failure Metric)

SLIKWORKS-supported features

1. Architecture based safety analyses generation - Upload an architecture, and automatically convert it into an FMEA form sheet

2. Built-in safety knowledge base - Pulls in known failure modes, effects, and causes from an evolving database 

3. AI assisted rating - Suggests Severity, Occurrence, and Detectability (S/O/D) ratings using AI (can be overridden by a user) 

4. Dynamically updating FMEA - Automatically updates the entire FMEA when any field is manually overridden, ensuring consistency across all related items

5. Gives engineers full control and transparency — all AI predictions can be manually adjusted by the engineers

SLIKWORKS - Benefits

1. One stop platform for all safety analyses - Perform all safety analysis like FMEA, FMEDA, HARA etc. in a single, unified workspace.

2. Seamless integration with requirements management tools - Easily link and synchronize safety artifacts with existing requirements management systems for end-to-end traceability.

3. Simple, intuitive user experience - Designed for ease of use, allowing engineers to get started immediately with little to no training required.