The purpose of aviation safety management systems (SMS) is to ensure aviation service providers have a structured, formal process to manage safety, thereby reducing risk to the "transportation system."
Aviation SMS implementations are designed to continuously improve safety performance by:
Continuous improvement in aviation SMS is a big subject – as big as your aviation safety management system.
Continuous improvement is a concept addressing the overall improvement of the entire SMS. How do you know that you can satisfy the SMS' continuous improvement requirements?
Across your SMS implementation, improvement will happen:
The final point, in particular, is non-negotiable. No matter how much you want to implement a functionally compliant aviation SMS using just your safety team, this is not sustainable. You need to have buy-in from employees and management alike, regardless of the size of your organization.
ICAO's Annex 19 states that all elements of an SMS implementation apply to all operators, regardless of their size and complexity. However, aviation service providers are encouraged to tailor the SMS requirements to their organization, as the strategies employed by one operator may not necessarily prove effective in another organization.
So how do you know your SMS' continuous improvement requirements are satisfied? The answer is not straightforward and is a bit subjective. Continuous improvement requirements will be satisfied when your organization routinely monitors SMS performance to identify potential areas of improvement. In addition, the outcomes of this "continuous improvement monitoring process" should lead to demonstrable improvements to the SMS.
Audits provide the accountable executive, upper management, and the safety team with an assessment of safety data, documentation, processes, and procedures related to the aviation SMS implementation. An audit provides management with the necessary data to make fact-based decisions regarding the:
Without exception, top management commitment and the organization's safety leadership team are critical to effective SMS implementation. Unless management can objectively evaluate where the aviation SMS implementation currently stands, there can be no practical strategy to adjust the course for the deficient SMS implementation.
SMS audits can be provided by internal or external auditors; however, it is recommended that an internal SMS audit is performed at least once before external SMS auditors are scheduled to audit your SMS.
Your internal SMS audit should:
Creating a dedicated “Continuous Improvement Audit” checklist is a good idea. It is easier to acquire an SMS audit checklist that is used in your region than to create your own.
An internal audit plan for continuous improvement will ensure that your continuous improvement audits are performed regularly and consistently. Your SMS audit plan should outline each aspect of your internal audit:
You might also include metadata information about your audit:
Below are key parts of the SMS you should include in your internal audit of continuous improvement.
Your reported safety issues' risk management performance is the baseline of your safety assurance operations. Randomly sampling historical safety issues that had been processed using your documented risk management processes is an efficient way to assess the performance of management as they manage identified safety issues that have been:
Randomly sampling historical safety issues should assess:
What you should be looking for is that the current risk assessment is equal to or lower than the most recent one. What you don’t want to see is a current risk assessment that is more than your most recent assessment, as this would indicate either:
Finding that too many safety issues are not managed well indicates that your Safety Assurance operations may not be improving.
Aviation key performance indicators (KPIs) are the quantitative sibling of your company's performance objectives. Auditing your KPIs involves verifying that:
When KPIs are not current or KPIs are not being monitored thoroughly, it shows a lack of commitment towards continuous improvement and will reflect poorly on external audits. Having automated KPI monitoring and notifications is a good way to ensure good audit performance.
Reviewing past internal and external audits is also a great way to measure the aviation SMS' continuous improvement:
Reviewing past internal audits:
Aviation leading indicators mark the underlying factors that drive safety performance. You might also call them “root causes” or “precursors” for safety performance. They are moderate to advanced metrics that are used by operators with more sophisticated SMS data management strategies.
Many aviation SMS implementations don’t begin to adopt the use of leading indicators until their SMS matures and there is sufficient safety data to assess. Some leading indicators may also double as KPIs or serve as an indicator as to whether safety goals and objectives are being achieved.
Nonetheless, leading indicators are an essential piece of your SMS to audit if you use them, especially as a marker of continuous improvement.
For more information about using leading indicators in your SMS implementation, see our list – it’s a great place to get started.
Finally, because buy-in from all employees is necessary for continuous improvement, assessing safety culture is important too. You can do this with:
Ideally, you assess safety culture at regular intervals and can track progress over time. It’s a powerful way to track the effectiveness of your safety promotional efforts.
Each organization is unique. What works well with one operator may not work with another. So how does one evaluate the performance of their continuous improvement processes? While I don't have all the answers to this question, I do have some best practices that you can easily use to demonstrate your organization's commitment to "continuous improvement to the SMS." These best practices include:
I'm certain your imagination can come up with a few more best practices to add to the list.
In closing, an SMS implementation has specific SMS documentation requirements that extend for many years. It is common to see operators trending safety data from five to ten years in the past. When dealing with vast amounts of safety data that span many years, a spreadsheet is simply the wrong technology to employ.
Operators with more than 40 employees are recommended to use an SMS database to manage their SMS documentation requirements. Even very small operators with fewer than 40 employees will benefit from an SMS database when they have high employee turnover or they are marketing their services as "premier" or for clients who consider themselves as "VIPs."
An SMS database will save many hours of the safety teams' time in collating and presenting safety data that demonstrates your organization's commitment to continuous improvement. To learn how your company can benefit from a low-cost, commercially available SMS database, please watch these short demo videos:
Last updated in October 2024.