Sofema Aviation Services (SAS) www.sassofia.com considers the role & purpose of Safety Performance within an Aviation Safety Management System.
Introduction
Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs) are essentially a means of providing an organizational health check by engaging with the following:
- Identifying any drift from established benchmarks.
- Ability to mitigate any identified unacceptable risk in operations.
Safety Management System Continuous Improvement
Implementing an effective risk-aware environment should be a managed organizational effort and monitoring and managing risk controls requires the full engagement of the Safety Office and Safety Expert Group.
Being able to measure performance is a key requirement to enable appropriate decision-making to ensure we can manage our risks to a level which is as low as reasonably practical (ALARP).
Creating Performance Indicators
Performance Indicators help the leadership team to understand whether organisations objectives are being met.
Performance indicators should reflect core organizational goals and objectives. The Performance indicators should in fact be based on these objectives.
The following broad areas potentially serve as Performance Measures and may be specifically modified to accommodate the organisations objectives.
- Compliance with all regulatory requirements – based on a low level of findings during internal & external regulatory audits.
- Status of Operational Safety Reports – In particular, the elimination of repeat events and validation of mitigation strategies.
- The effectiveness of the Risk management processes concerning the effectiveness of both risk mitigation and risk controls.
Ability to manage data and how effective is the use of this data as a source to validate safety goals and objectives.
What Are Safety Management System Risk Controls?
The term “Risk Control” is used to indicate a particular process, procedure, or internal mechanism (for example training) which is employed by the company.
Areas of Potential Exposure include related to workplace Competence and Human behaviour.
Such Risk Control acts as a buffer to limit the exposure to a particular risk.
Understanding The Role of Lagging and Leading Indicators in Our Aviation SMS
It is useful to understand the different risk indicators within our aviation SMS.
- Lagging indicators are metrics for safety events that have already occurred.
- Leading indicators are used to measure factors that may have an effect on future performance. (Could be either positive or negative)
Risk Profile Considerations
Ultimately it is a task for the leadership team to identify an acceptable risk profile for each given business area. Whilst compliance is off course a mandatory given (and should therefore be in “top” shape), performance-related outcomes are a different story.
Behaviours which are subjective depend to a large degree on cultural interaction and will vary from organisation to organisation.
Next Steps
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aviation, aviation safety, Safety Management System, safety performance, Aviation SMS, SPI, SAS blogs, Safety Performance Indicators, Risk Control, Potential Exposure, Operational Safety Reports
