Abstract Hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP) has developed from a tentative approach to hazard identification for process plants in the early 1970s to an almost universally accepted approach today, and a central technique of safety engineering. Techniques for automated HAZOP analysis were developed in the 1970s, but still have not displaced expensive manual approaches. Reasons for this were investigated and conclusions are drawn. The author’s actual experience in applying automated HAZOP techniques over a period of more than 30 years is revisited, including results from several full-scale validation studies and many industrial applications. Automated techniques, when combined with manual approaches, were found to provide significant improvements in HAZOP quality and a limited but valuable improvement in efficiency.