Aviation Safety Management Systems SMS – Time for a Reality Check

Let’s get real!

Question – Is SMS is all about Compliance?
Answer – No – It’s about Managing Risk.

Safety management goes far beyond traditional compliance led approaches to auditing.
So a Safety Management System has to identify potential safety risks and Hazards. At the heart of any effective Safety Management System is a formal Risk Management process that identifies hazards and assesses and mitigates risk.
The next step is to mitigate or manage any risks identified to an acceptable or tolerable level. An essential aspect being the management of risk generated by Contract or Sub Contracted organization particularly where this may directly impact the organization.

Question – Is SMS is just an extension of the Quality System?
Answer – No – Safety Auditing is very different. In fact Safety Auditing is very subjective, almost holistic. Safety Auditing is looking at Risk or in other words the potential exposures, faced by the Organisational system.

Question – Is SMS owned by the SAFETY Manager?
Answer – No – The SMS System is owned by the Accountable Manager but each Post Holder is responsible for the effective delivery of the SMS within their business area. Sometimes called a Top Down Approach.

Question – Can a safety management system be “installed within a short period of time”?
Answer – No – It is going to take more than a year and near 18 months to 2 years to bed in your SMS system.

Please consider the following SMS Realities:
One size definitely does not fit all, it should be scalable and appropriate for the organization.
SMS is a proactive and integrated approach to Safety. It should be integrated into the management system the organization.
To be effective it has to describe and to educate the entire workforce as to the structure, and scope of the organization, available resources, staff accountabilities, authorities and responsibilities.
A real challenge facing any organization is how to set and monitor the Safety performance of the organization. Essentially this is a process which is data driven so one measure of the effectiveness of the SMS is how it gathers data.
This is especially true in the operations environment.

Key Elements of an effective SMS
The SMS should comprise of the following four key components:

a) Safety Policy and Objectives
b) Safety Risk Management
c) Safety Assurance
d) Safety Promotion

Each of the above elements is critically important and all must be visible and active within the SMS System.

Key Personnel in an effective SMS
Whist the individual business owners are responsible for safety management an SMS champion is essential for the health of the SMS system.(This person may be the Safety Manager or he may be the Quality manager or another person, the important point is to ensure effective management of the entire process.)

SofemaOnline offers several SMS trainings, please see here.

You can also benefit from our discounts for multiple enrollments.

If any questions occur during the studying process our experienced trainers would be happy to support you. Please see www.sofemaonline.com or email online@sassofia.com or office@sassofia.com