Running a spreadsheet-based SMS or upgrading to a software-based SMS is a decision that companies are increasingly having to make a choice upon. A majority of aviation safety management systems are spreadsheet-based. If you are a safety manager, your SMS is probably based on spreadsheets.
You can’t deny the limitations of spreadsheets, however. Aviation safety management software offers efficiency and analysis ability that is orders of magnitudes above spreadsheets. Of course, acquiring SMS software can mean a dramatic shift in your organization:
With integrated SMS software and SMS point solutions, spreadsheets are falling further and further behind the sophisticated functionality of such software in terms of:
What does this mean for you, the safety manager, working on Excel spreadsheets? Your job is more labor-intensive and your ability to manage is less comprehensive. To be clear, this isn’t simply a way of self-promotion our integrated SMS software, because even point solutions offer a major advantage over spreadsheets.
Let’s explore this in a bit more detail and compare spreadsheets vs software for aviation safety management.
How much time do you spend trying to monitor the performance of your SMS? Ideally, you spend a lot of time doing this, especially as you move through Phase 3 of SMS implementation. Safety monitoring includes:
Performing all of these tasks with spreadsheets will be impossible because:
Because of this, many aviation safety programs:
Furthermore, point solutions and aviation safety software offer additional benefit for safety performance by:
Metadata provides extremely valuable context to your safety data. Having detailed meta-data is a great way to significantly increase your ability for:
In spreadsheet-based safety programs, capturing metadata is extremely limited, and what metadata is gathered is tedious to document. Metadata is where aviation SMS software and point solutions really shine as all important metadata is automatically captured.
Metadata includes information like:
There are many more types of metadata, but these are just some examples that provide you an idea of the kinds of things that are difficult or impossible to capture with manual, spreadsheet-based SMS.
Being able to perform complex data analysis is one of the other significant benefits of SMS software. With software, you harness the power of:
Complex data analysis is simply not feasible with spreadsheets for several logical reasons:
Point solutions and SMS software automate this process via:
Where SMS software really shines in larger organizations with many complex moving parts that can only be reasonably analyzed with the assistance of software.
Something you gain when you adopt aviation SMS software over spreadsheets and even point solutions is an integrated SMS. An integrated SMS means that different parts of your safety management system are tied together in meaningful ways, such as:
With spreadsheets, you are essentially limited to having a spreadsheet perform only one meaningful task. Secondly, there may be duplicates of each spreadsheet, they may be dated, etc.
Trying to manage the many moving parts of an SMS in spreadsheets requires an unrealistic amount of effort in such systems. This is why spreadsheet-based safety programs usually only have a handful of spreadsheets to document core operations.
In summary, you gain substantial benefits by using aviation safety management software over spreadsheet-based SMS. These main benefits are:
Last updated November 2024.