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
Aviation is one of the safest modes of transportation, thanks to rigorous safety protocols and continuous learning from incidents. For aviation safety managers, incident investigations are a cornerstone of maintaining and enhancing safety. These investigations aim to uncover the root causes of incidents to prevent future occurrences, not to assign blame.
As outlined in ICAO Annex 13, the sole objective is prevention, ensuring lessons learned contribute to safer skies.
In aviation safety management, responsibility, confidentiality, and privacy are the triad that affects how you handle reported safety information. Whether your organization is large or small, your leadership team needs to discuss these factors and decide how to handle them.
Your organization may decide that it doesn’t need to pay particular attention to this triad,
Risk management tools in aviation SMS is simply a vague term that refers to resources that can help you manage risk. Often, the most beneficial resources tend to be simple, inexpensive, and helpful for both providing guidance and helping you organize your time.
The aviation industry relies heavily on computers for every touchpoint of aviation service, from ground to flight operations. Cybersecurity is a term that refers to the safety of such computer systems – it is also called info-security. If nefarious individuals were able to get access to some of your computer systems, they could pose a catastrophic threat to flight operations.
Topics: 1-Safety Policy, Quality-Safety Management
Proactive risk management is often esteemed as the “best” type of risk management. This is because proactive risk management usually matures later in SMS implementation. Also, it involves identifying and stopping issues before they occur.
Despite this, it’s important to understand that proactive risk management is not “better” than reactive or predictive risk management, it is just one necessary strategy for managing risk.
The primary goals of proactive risk management are:
The idea of a safety management system (SMS) is something those of us in the aviation risk management industry use as if an SMS were one solid “thing.” But a safety management system is actually made up of multiple ideas, packaged into a single, functioning effort for better aviation safety.
Topics: 1-Safety Policy, Quality-Safety Management
Proving the effectiveness of your aviation safety management system comes in several flavors. Who are you proving the effectiveness to? You might be showing your SMS effectiveness at managing safety to:
In the aviation industry, it’s important to manage change effectively. Change can be organizational, procedural, or technological.
Change occurs any time an established practice is altered.
Change can seem small, like changing suppliers. Or it could be a large change, like adding a new type of airplane to your feet.
When you plan for changes before they happen, you can take measures to proactively manage risk as well. Managing risk is a fundamental part of managing change.
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
In SMS, it’s extremely useful to organize reported issues by classifying them with classifications.
A classification is simply a unit of organization. By “unit of organization,” we are talking about a short phrase that describes the safety issue in one way. This issue can be described in terms of:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
These two on-demand videos offer:
