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In November 2006, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) mandated that all
member states implement formal aviation safety management systems (SMS). To facilitate
compliance, ICAO provided guidance to regulatory authorities and aviation service providers
with the publication of the Safety Management Manual (SMM), now in the fourth edition as of
2019.
An aviation SMS implementation covers considerable territory, including, but not limited to:
• Safety accountabilities;
• Management responsibilities;
• Hazard identification and risk analysis;
• Risk management processes; and
• Employee SMS training.
To add structure to ICAO's SMS guidance, the SMM is broken down into four major
components, which have since been fondly referred to as the four SMS pillars. These SMS
pillars are:
• Safety policy;
• Safety risk management;
• Safety assurance; and
• Safety promotion.
Safety assurance will strongly inform management of the type of activities that result from
implemented safety policy and safety promotion activities.
While aviation SMS implementations that are a complete farce may be reasonably rare, box
checking is a very real problem in many SMS implementations. Even in SMS implementations
that feature reasonable risk management, safety policy, and safety promotion components,
the safety assurance component may be very undervalued and subsequently, under-utilized.
The result is that safety management will check off that they “reviewed” a policy, risk control,
etc. when in actuality, all they did was perform a cursory, obligatory review. The obvious
symptom that such a practice is happening will manifest itself as audit findings on parts of
the SMS that were documented as being “reviewed.”
Quality management activities can infringe upon safety management’s ability to fulfill the
safety assurance requirements, such as when upper management places emphasis on
[quality] performance rather than preparedness. This becomes a challenge for all aviation
service providers as they seek to balance their energies between profit-driving activities and
activities that may not immediately, or noticeably add to the bottom line, such as safety
initiatives.
Uniting quality and safety assurance activities into one, interactive system makes a lot of
business and safety sense for several reasons:
• Fewer aviation policies and procedures to manage (and more resources to be used
elsewhere);
• Better safety culture results in increased quality efficiency and safety performance;
• Better safety oversight capabilities;
• Better return on investment for company; and
• Better ability to monitor business performance.
This is based on the larger picture of interchangeability of each of the aviation SMS
components:
• Facilitate safety in the environment by reporting and managing safety issues (safety
risk management);
• Monitor risk management activities; (safety assurance);
• Create/update policies and procedures (safety policy) based on risk management
performance;
• Promote policy and other needed safety elements in order to improve risk
management performance.
All four SMS components are required in an SMS. There is a purpose for each pillar, and if any
pillar is neglected, the SMS will fail. Safety assurance activities are designed to detect these
aviation SMS failures. As these failures are detected, management adjusts the "SMS recipe"
to correct the identified deficiency or mitigate future risk.
SRM and SA pillars receive the most attention in an implemented SMS. When safety concerns
are identified by SA activities, there is a natural tendency to review the system design in the
SRM pillar. Not all substandard safety performance stems from the system design.
Substandard safety performance is often the result of poor safety policy design or a lack of
convincing safety promotion activities. The point is that safety management systems are
"systems" and should be reviewed holistically and not in isolation.
Monitoring SMS activities become less burdensome when management chooses the
appropriate SMS data management strategy. Too often, safety management teams attempt
to manage and monitor SMS activities using a plethora of disconnected data management
tools. An integrated SMS data management approach is better.
To learn how a modern SMS database can provide extra assurance to management, review
these short demo videos. SMS auditors love it when they do not have to hunt for information
that demonstrates SMS compliance. SMS auditors lose patience and become frustrated as
they wait for safety managers to search their various systems for data that "may" exist. An
SMS database keeps all your SMS eggs in one basket.