xSeriCon Turned Its Safety Expertise Into the Product Its Industry Could Not Buy
A safety consultancy productized its expertise: xSeriCon's three engineers built Vizop, a modern HAZOP and risk analysis platform that saves clients 10% of multi-week workshop time.
10%
Of multi-week workshop time saved for clients, worth thousands of dollars in engineering costs per study
10-20
Highly paid engineers in each risk workshop whose time the app saves
3
Engineers built the entire platform, with no frontend specialist
- Founded
- 2015
- Website
- xsericon.com
You've got 10 to 20 highly paid engineers sitting together in a room for two weeks. Every day that you can save is thousands and thousands of dollars of saved manpower costs. And perhaps even more importantly, it helps them meet the project timeline.
Before a chemical plant is built or modified, the companies involved have to prove it is safe: a series of formal risk studies that identify every accident that could happen and confirm enough protection is in place. Those studies are among the most expensive meetings in industry, and the software available to run them has barely changed in decades.
xSeriCon is a safety consultancy serving the companies that design and build chemical facilities, from major engineering firms to operators across oil and gas, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. After years of running those studies for clients, the firm did what few consultancies do: it turned its expertise into a product. Three engineers, led by Managing Director Peter Clarke, built Vizop, a platform for running HAZOP, LOPA, and alarm rationalization studies.
The two-week meeting that decides a project
A single risk study can run for days or weeks, with 10 to 20 senior engineers working through a facility section by section. What they produce is not tidy sensor data; it is human judgment, in narrative form, at volume.
The amount of information that you gather during one of these studies can be quite colossal, and every case is different. It's a lot of human-generated narrative-type data which doesn't fit into convenient patterns or molds. That's why it's so labor-intensive.
Every day of that meeting has a price in engineering salaries, and a schedule cost beyond the salaries: the study sits on the critical path of the whole project.
The risk analysis software you can buy
The established HAZOP and risk analysis tools share the same profile: desktop-bound, dated, and hard enough to learn that the tool itself becomes part of the workshop's overhead. xSeriCon set the opposite bar for Vizop.
I wanted to get as near as possible to the point where somebody could just walk up, type in the URL, and start using it with no instruction and no training. That's a little bit utopian, but I want to get as close as I can to that. And I think Reflex actually does help us quite a lot with that.
The difference, side by side:
| The established tools | Vizop | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Installed on a desktop | Any browser, one URL |
| Learning curve | Training before the workshop | Walk up and start working |
| Working with the drawing | Look at it, then type into a spreadsheet | Work directly on the drawing itself |
| Users in a study | One operator's machine | Online and multi-user |
| Marking up drawing sections | A separate PDF application | On the roadmap, inside Vizop |
For how to run the build-or-buy decision on your own tools, see our build vs. buy framework for internal software.
The feature nobody sells
Vizop keeps the familiar worksheet, the spreadsheet-style study interface risk engineers have used for decades. The part no purchasable tool offers is the second mode: running the study on the engineering drawing itself.
What we really want is for the user to be able to work directly on the drawing instead of having to just look at the drawing and then type what they think about it into a spreadsheet. This is kind of groundbreaking, because none of the other competing apps on the market will do this.
In Vizop today, an engineer can open a piping and instrumentation diagram, such as an LNG ship unloading facility, click a symbol, and tell the app what it is. Once Vizop knows a component is a pressure sensor, a built-in database supplies how it can fail and what protection it can provide. The app has shipped and is in production use in-house, with the first external client studies ahead.
The economics for clients
Vizop's pitch is time. xSeriCon estimates the platform saves at least 10% of workshop time. Against 10 to 20 engineers in a room for two weeks, that would take days of salary cost and schedule risk out of every study, and the first external client studies will put a hard number against the estimate.
Planned releases push the same advantage further, moving more of the workshop's manual steps into the platform. Peter's test for what makes the roadmap:
It sounds like a small thing, but when you're working with hundreds of these drawings, every little bit of time and effort saved, and the fact that you can do it in one app instead of switching back and forth between two apps, is a real, real plus.
Why xSeriCon chose to build with Reflex
The firm's edge is judgment accumulated over years of studies, and no vendor's product could hold it. Building meant a three-person team, with no product department and no additional hires, had to produce commercial-grade software clients would pay for.
How it was built
This section is written for your technical team. In short: Vizop is the third generation of the product, and the first two taught xSeriCon exactly what to avoid.
View the technical details
The first generation was a standalone desktop application built on the wxPython windowing library. It worked, but the library was legacy, and the product needed to become online and multi-user.
The second generation was Django, with a hired frontend developer building the interface. Six months later the attempt was abandoned: the two halves of the application never came together, and several tens of thousands of dollars of code never ran.
Honestly, Django, I hated it on day one, and I still hated it on the day we ditched it, which was about six months later. It was just like wrestling with a barrel of snakes.
We just found that the backend and frontend weren't talking to each other properly. No matter how many meetings we had or how many specs I wrote saying "this is what I want it to do," we basically couldn't get it to work.
With Reflex, that failure mode is structural history: the same engineer writes both ends in the same language, so there is no handoff to fail. A search for the next framework produced four candidates.
Reflex was the obvious standout candidate, even though at that time it was very new and raw. I'm a Python kind of fuddy-duddy who only knows how to code in Python, so it looked like the obvious choice.
Reflex just felt like a big box of tools that we could do whatever we wanted with. We can do everything in Python, both the back end and the front end.
Vizop is xSeriCon's commercial product, and the team adopted Reflex around version 0.3, betting the product on a young framework.
It was a bit of a risk for us to stake everything on a very, very new framework.
More than a year later, the bet has held. Peter wrote roughly half the application himself and works alongside Paul, a full-time developer building in Reflex daily. The entire app is hand-written Python, with no AI coding tools involved, or as Peter puts it, "RI: real intelligence instead of AI."
On the roadmap: marking up drawing sections inside Vizop instead of a separate PDF application, automatic recognition of standard drawing symbols, and worksheets pre-populated from what the drawing already shows.
From consultancy to product company
What started as a desktop tool only xSeriCon could run is now an online, multi-user product clients open in a browser: a consultancy's expertise, captured once as software and sold from then on.
We've invested a lot of time and money into getting this far, and we're happy to keep on going with it. No regrets so far.
For the same pattern inside a much larger consulting organization, see how Autodesk delivers client software in 60 days with one consultant.
Frequently asked questions about risk analysis software
Can a small consultancy turn its expertise into a software product?
Yes. xSeriCon, a chemical-industry safety consultancy, built Vizop with three engineers and no frontend specialist: a commercial risk analysis platform, now in production use, that captures decades of process safety expertise as software clients open in a browser.
Is there modern HAZOP software, or are the tools all desktop-bound?
Most established HAZOP and risk analysis tools are desktop-bound, dated, and hard to learn. xSeriCon built Vizop as a browser-based, multi-user alternative with a bar of walk up, type in the URL, and start working, including the ability to run the study directly on the engineering drawing, which competing tools do not offer.
How much time can better safety-study software save?
xSeriCon estimates at least 10% off workshop time, and a risk study can mean 10 to 20 highly paid engineers in a room for two weeks, so every day saved is thousands of dollars in engineering cost and a better chance of meeting the project timeline.
What is the path from a desktop tool to a web product?
xSeriCon's took three generations: a wxPython desktop app, a six-month Django attempt that failed on the split between frontend and backend teams, and finally a rebuild in Reflex, where the same engineers write both ends in Python and the product ships as an online, multi-user platform.
See what other teams built
See what your team could build.
Tell us about your workflow. See how Reflex can help you turn it into an application.