The automotive industry successfully implemented functional safety standards such as ISO 26262 in the past years. Many of the required functional safety analysis activities are supported by matured, dedicated tool and workflow solutions. Such tools help to deliver high quality functional safety work products in a very efficient manner. It is time to go for the next step – digitalizing the management of functional safety. So far, automation of functional safety management tasks has been rather low. Safety managers depend on manual activities without any digital assistance, plus the additional challenge that the safety management is a continuous, multi-year activity. This resulted into several pain points that the presentation will summarize. Based on this analysis, 5 key items for improvements through automation have been identified: 1. tool guided creation, tailoring and re-use of safety plans, with automated monitoring of the execution regarding key performance indicators, 2. variant managed safety plans considering the utilization of available system and component safety work products in variants for a product line, 3. automated derivation of safety case, 4. “delta safety case” (i.e. safety case re-use) with impact analysis and 5. measures to provide confidence in the automation approaches. For each of these functional improvement items, the to-be characteristics of digital assistance will be detailed. These have been piloted in the tools environment that our customers uses for functional safety analysis activities already. This pilot environment needs to be as open as possible to integrated with any IT infrastructure that an organization will have. It is supported by dashboards and other means of information visualization to give a high-level view of the maturity and status of functional safety activities for a given product/product line.