Selecting key performance indicators (KPIs) in aviation safety management systems (SMS) is neither simple nor always intuitive. In addition to being time-consuming and costly, selecting and monitoring KPIs can also be a stressful experience.
Lives depend on choosing good KPIs. Your job may depend on selecting good KPIs.
Fortunately, selecting KPIs is helped by the fact that:
Topics: Key Performance Indicators
While the safety benefits are often stressed far more than the financial benefits of aviation safety management systems (SMS), this is a mistake. When companies benefit financially from a safety initiative, what this means is that they benefit financially because the safety initiative is actually improving safety.
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Audits can be extremely stressful. Especially if things haven't been going well in your aviation safety management system (SMS) in terms of performance or implementation progress.
At this point, there's only one thing that you need to do before anything else:
No audit is going to be perfect. There are going to be findings. Obviously, the fewer, the better.
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Last year we released a Hazard and Risk Competency Quiz, which deals a lot with the concept of Risk Events. Overall the assessment – which was purposefully very difficult – was very successful.
We received a lot of feedback about Risk Events, and for the most part aviation safety managers
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
If there’s one takeaway for new professionals in aviation safety management, it’s that aviation risk management is a process. It is not a single, solid “thing.”
This process is cyclical and can be identified by several stages that form a systematic approach to safety risk management, including:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
By definition, aviation safety culture is an organization’s commitment to safety. I tend to find this definition limiting.
Perhaps a better way to understand safety culture is the means of realizing safety success, in which commitment is just one part.
Of course, safety culture in the aviation industry needs to be coupled with an organized, compliant aviation safety management system (SMS) in order to increase an organization's ability for safety success.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
A corrective action is a risk management process, tool or activity used to correct any undesirable element of an aviation service provider's operational system. Most commonly, the term "corrective action" is used loosely to represent "corrective actions and preventative actions," or CPAs. You may also see corrective actions called CAPAs (corrective action preventative action) or RCAs (recommended corrective actions), though CPA is the most recognized acronym globally in the aviation industry.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
In November 2006, the International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) mandated that all member states implement formal aviation safety management systems (SMS). Each member state's civil aviation authority (CAA) is responsible for providing oversight to ensure the operators required to implement the aviation SMS comply.
Aviation SMS implementations need to be accounted for in 2 main ways.
Topics: 1-Safety Policy
Historically, quality management systems (QMS) and safety management systems (SMS) have been implemented and managed as two entirely separate entities. Today this separation persists in many if not most, companies. This is an unfortunate fact because integrating QMS and SMS provides a great opportunity for organizations to:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Fishbone diagram libraries provide many opportunities and benefits for aviation service providers who decide to adopt fishbone diagrams as a risk management tool in their aviation safety management systems (SMS).
The primary benefit of fishbone diagrams provide is detail.
Fishbone diagrams:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
These two on-demand videos offer:
