Effective safety management systems not only produce safe operations, they can actually make a positive impact on people and profits.
by Bernie Baldwin
04-May-2021
“Safety is no accident.” The provenance of this well-used phrase (perhaps even cliché) may not be known, but its association with the aviation industry is lengthy and appropriate. Achieving ‘no accident’ means well-thought strategies, hard work and meticulous application. All that and more goes into the development and operation of a safety management system (SMS).
According to the US FAA, the four major components of a SMS are “safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance and safety promotion (safety culture)”, all of which need to be incorporated into an airline’s operations.
Jo Gillespie, head of safety and risk management and a director at Gates Aviation, elaborates on their implementation. “These four components, together with their 12 constituent elements [see table], reflect the SMS framework promulgated by ICAO. As such, most ICAO contracting states have adopted them in much the same way as the FAA,” he observes.
“There has been much debate and discussion over the years about how best to implement SMS and an entire ‘industry’ has evolved to support organisations in their efforts. [ICAO’s] Doc 9859 has some guidance on implementation planning, but probably the worst approach is to establish a SMS and its components as a separate and standalone function.
“It is essential to success that the principles of the SMS are adopted throughout the organisation and embedded in all of its activities. That is why the safety policy and how it is worded is so important,” Gillespie emphasises. “Rather than a copy of a template, the policy must truly reflect the leadership’s aspirations and expectations in terms of safety and risk – everything that follows must be shaped by it. Closely allied to the policy are the safety goals and performance indicators.
“For effective SMS implementation, there needs to be a change in organisational culture,” he continues. “If you look up the meaning of culture, you will usually find a definition that includes something about ‘shared behaviours and beliefs’ and if you accept that most behaviour is driven by belief, changing culture means changing belief. That has to start at the very top because if the leadership team does not collectively and individually believe in the principles, nobody else will either.
“The best advice I have heard on this subject is to start with habits and seek to change any that are less than optimal in terms of safety and efficiency. It is certainly easier to change habits than beliefs. There is also an emerging argument that if an organisation strives to do everything right – regulatory compliance, ethical treatment of staff and customers, open management, fairness and so on – then good safety outcomes will arise naturally,” Gillespie reports.
Massachusetts-based software provider ETQ agrees that safety is not an ‘add-on’, but part of a company’s culture. “It should be in every part of an airline’s operation,” states an ETQ spokesperson. “It is most visible in the operation of an aircraft, from the time it is ordered until it is retired.
“When thinking about day-to-day operations, all policies and procedures need to have a safety component, whether that is the flight precheck, during flight operations, or even something as mundane as cleaning. A key component of safety has to be the ability for employees to report problems without reprisals. Being able to submit concerns anonymously at any point in time during the life of an aircraft is critical to maintaining safety,” the spokesperson stresses. “From a people perspective, safety shows up in training individuals and tracking the results of that training. This training should cover all aspects of operations.”
Bob Simmons, director of safety specialists Baines Simmons, believes that all too often SMS is seen as the system that people “have to step into when something goes wrong or when there’s a blatantly obvious change or hazard that has safety risks attached. It is seen as sitting outside of the ‘day job’ and something run and reported by ‘those clever people in Safety’ and is heavily data dependent,” he remarks frankly.
“The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recognised that the operation of an SMS that is separated from the commercial management (and thinking) of an organisation and other elements of the management system, would not realise the safety performance improvements that are needed. So there is an opportunity for smart IT solutions to facilitate this methodology,” he notes.
The EASA requirement for a management system that includes the management of safety risk encourages organisations to combine commercial, quality and safety performance ownership, targets and reporting. Integrated performance thinking enables organisations to treat any reports, negative trends, complaints or risk assessments as opportunities to improve overall organisation performance – so a safety issue, or equally, a commercial issue, should be seen as an opportunity to improve performance against all performance criteria,” Simmons continues. “After all, if you make it easier for people to work in a safe way, you make it easy for them to work in an efficient and compliant way – and the reverse will normally also hold true.”
In Simmons’ experience, the focus on the introduction of safety risk management has distracted some organisations from effectively managing compliance. “If you consider that a large proportion of the aviation safety regulations have evolved as a result of bad experiences, the effective management of safety risk is achieved through effective regulatory compliance management.
“The message here is that there is a direct connection between regulatory compliance and safety risk management, as well as the commercial success of an organisation and that compartmentalisation of data, performance targets, reporting and continuous improvement hinders the unconscious management of safety risk as part of the day job. And having a standalone SMS or segregated safety database doesn’t help!” Simmons exclaims.
So far as implementation is concerned, Simmons advises against isolating the SMS from the rest of the organisation’s management system. “Blur safety management into the day job so that people don’t know that they are doing it. It’s easily said, but it takes some hard work to achieve and then reap the commercial benefits,” he says.
“Businesses in high-risk industries tend to walk a fine line between the cost of being excessively ‘safe’ and the impacts of being insufficiently so. Maximising the safety margin by leaving aircraft in the hangar [not that Air Astana would – Ed] would clearly be catastrophic from a financial perspective,” explains Jo Gillespie of Gates Aviation.
As noted, IT applications are used to aid the work of an SMS to increase the fidelity of the overall system. According to ETQ, an automated SMS “really supports the collection of data and its analysis. It serves as the repository of all submitted information about any reported safety concerns. Sophisticated analytics can spot trends and identify issues. Root cause analysis tools can help drive successful resolution”.
One of ETQ’s customers, a global airline, has incorporated machine learning algorithms into its regular ETQ Reliance Quality Management System (QMS) workflow. “Utilising extensive quality and safety data collected in its Reliance QMS, the company developed several predictive models to match, improve, and standardise analyst processing,” say the ETQ spokesperson. “The predictive models work for external communications during a standard workflow and for processing recommendations during an analyst review. For the airline, this means that its 24/7 operation remains uninterrupted by processes needed to deal with data flagged as questionable.
“In addition, having a repository of policies, procedures, maintenance information, equipment details all under document and audit control means that the organisation is prepared when an audit occurs. Further, if there is an issue – or unfortunately, a catastrophic event – regulators can efficiently access details about the equipment involved, bolstered by the confidence that they can trace any changes made over time though a secure audit trail,” the ETQ spokesperson confirms.
According to ETQ, the resulting output can take the form of reports, charts, and other analytics that an end-user, manager, executive or regulator can use to answer questions. Further, they should be able to query the system for specific information related to a piece of equipment or an event. The users should be able to review processes and procedures and ensure they are being followed, and that employees have been properly trained and that the individuals involved are doing what they are supposed to do.
Also discussing the areas where IT applications are deployed, Bob Simmons reports that it is generally where safety data is used alongside or combined with commercial, quality, customer satisfaction and compliance data. “After all, it’s the same things that affect performance against all of those performance criteria – people, resources, systems, culture, procedures, standards and so on,” he comments.
On the resulting output from an SMS, he avers that simple, relevant information, aligned with day-to-day operations has the biggest impact. “If an organisation defines ‘What good looks like’ and ‘what do we need to deliver that?’, and the system answers the question ‘how safe (including how compliant) are we today and how safe (and compliant) will we be tomorrow?’ then it can really add value and stands a better chance of meeting its full potential for the organisation – and becoming a profit generator rather than an overhead,” Simmons summarises.
Gates Aviation’s Gillespie recalls that the use of IT in an SMS began in two principal functions: the recording, analysis and storage of aircraft flight data; and the management of safety incident, accident, near-miss and hazard reports. “Over the years the platforms have expanded and now some can handle not only all functional data of the SMS, but much of the organisation’s other data such as manuals, compliance auditing and crew records,” he adds.
“Some IT applications are better than others and a good indication is that if the organisation needs to change effective safety practices to shoe-horn itself into the platform, it is the wrong one,” he declares. “Another important factor is the agility of the teams managing the application, both internally and externally. If necessary changes cannot be made quickly and accurately, the system will soon become a burden to safety rather than a benefit.”
Moving on to the information outputs of any SMS – whether IT based or manual – Gillespie believes they should allow the leadership to determine performance against the safety goals and the safety policy. “Traditionally, this has consisted of a list of occasions that the system has failed or nearly failed to meet the target levels of safety. However, it is increasingly being recognised that the systems should also provide outputs of when and how things went well, so that these can be promoted and encouraged. In most operations most things go well most of the time, but it is important to understand why that is and what margin there is between these routine activities and potential disaster,” he advises.
“Measuring the magnitude of that margin is vital, because businesses in high-risk industries tend to walk a fine line between the cost of being excessively ‘safe’ and the impacts of being insufficiently so. Maximising the safety margin by leaving aircraft in the hangar would clearly be catastrophic from a financial perspective. This ends in the so-called ‘management dilemma’ of allocating finite resources to both production (operations) and protection (safety), and SMS outputs which can inform that decision-making are invaluable.
“For these reasons it is important that the SMS generates both leading and lagging performance indicators,” Gillespie explains further. “Leading indicators reflect the frequency or quantity of risk reducing activities, which have been implemented to address an identified hazard – the number and duration of bird-scaring patrols at an airport, for example, to address the hazard of wildlife strikes. The associated lagging indicator would of course be the number of bird-strikes that occur. Careful monitoring of the two should allow an efficient balance between effort and reward – not just safety, but safety at the right price.
“Finally, procedural non-compliance – a failure to follow standard procedures – has been implicated in numerous incidents and accidents in aviation and elsewhere. Whilst rigid and unswerving compliance is not a goal, it is very helpful for managers to understand the level of compliance with procedures. Widespread non-compliance can be due to a number of factors, ranging from recklessness through ignorance to inappropriate procedures. Whatever the origins, it needs to be addressed and SMS outputs which provide information about the degree of compliance are very useful,” Gillespie concludes.
Some may certainly see “Safety is no accident” as a cliché, but clichés are mainly grounded in truth and all the aforementioned efforts which go into effective safety management systems reinforce the veracity of that statement.
Join the Challenge
We’re discussing this in our Challenges area- Do you believe that safety management systems should be incorporated into an airline’s operations or should be a separate, stand-alone function?
;
