The process industries are under ever increasing pressure to demonstrate that their operations, either new or existing, will be safe. In response to this pressure, the process industries have developed a number of techniques to aid the assessment of risks and of the consequences of failure associated with process operations. These techniques apply to a very broad range of areas from inherent safety ideas for process selection and development, through automated safety assessment of designs, to operator training. This paper presents an industrial view of those techniques which are applied during the design phase of an operating plant’s life and which are or will soon be supported by computer aided process engineering tools. Particular reference will be made to two current projects STOPHAZ and MODHAZ. These projects are aimed at automatically identifying hazards associated with a proposed process design and providing best practice safety advice on how to design out hazards (STOPHAZ), and at the efficient identification of hazards in proposed designs which re-use previously studied plant modules (MODHAZ). Industrial experience is presented, plotting the evolution of tools to the current state-of-the-art and looking ahead to the future needs of industry in this area.