Automating safety management through QMS and SMS integration

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While there’s significant pressure to design, develop, and manufacture industry-leading flight solutions to meet increasing demand, there’s also the need to balance safety, quality, and innovation. Aircraft failure – and its potentially fatal consequences – are constant drivers of uncompromising attention to detail. Seemingly simple missteps, such as misplaced nuts and bolts, can cause major failures with potentially catastrophic outcomes.

However, meeting growing demand for high quality and safe aircraft isn’t the only challenge facing manufacturers. As one of the most highly regulated industries, aircraft manufacturers operate under the watchful eye of more than a dozen national and international regulatory groups.

When you factor in the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA)’s requirement for strict aviation and product safety data tracking, the need for tool control in aviation maintenance – and the associated challenges of incident tracking, documenting, reporting, and training – can mount quickly for a manufacturer.

One global aircraft manufacturer with a long history of developing and operating some of the safest aircraft in the world is a case in point. To further elevate its strong safety record, streamline its processes, and expand its culture of safety, the company made the strategic decision to integrate an automated Safety Management System (SMS) with its Quality Management System (QMS). The company’s aircraft are used by all five branches of the U.S. armed forces, as well as by military services and commercial operators in dozens of countries, and its continued success is based on its ability to consistently and reliably deliver safe aircraft to these customers.

Shifting from digital to automated

The aircraft manufacturer previously relied on Excel spreadsheets to track its aviation and product safety data. While digital versions of the manual quality processes had served the company for decades, there also was a growing realization that employees and customers needed to be more deeply engaged in the process. Despite the familiarity that many employees had with these established workflows and tools, the manual data entry made it difficult to look at safety metrics across the enterprise and gain insight into where safety resources should be allocated.

Following the FAA mandate for effective SMS in aircraft design and manufacturing, the SMS team began to aggressively pursue solutions to ensure quality across the organization. Their goal was to meet and exceed ever-stringent safety protocols and give the company the power to proactively identify trends in data and predict safety outcomes. The company implemented a SMS program within its aviation and product safety department to quickly and efficiently generate truly actionable insights and provide a more accurate view of high-risk items that impact aviation safety. This new integrated system would deliver a richer view of its safety process than its manual systems were capable of handling.

Knowing the return on investment (ROI) for aviation safety measures isn’t always easy to calculate, the company’s SMS leaders had to prove the financial value of the new system to leadership.

According to the SMS program manager, “We know there’s a ROI for improving safety, but it’s not like you know quantitatively how many aircraft we saved from crashing because of an SMS solution. Finding a solution that could provide insights into safety trends – and make the entire organization more proactive in dealing with issues – was essential for driving results, as well as stakeholder buy-in.”

Benefits

The company made the strategic decision to integrate its automated SMS with its QMS to elevate and balance its production and safety goals, and enable it to:

Contextualize data analysis – The company knew for data to truly impact safety, it must provide actionable insights that all users can access and leverage to drive decisions. The company transitioned 6,000 files from legacy programs that weren’t providing these insights. Having access to historical data has helped the organization avoid making the same safety or quality mistakes twice.

Democratize safety engagement – While every company needs a safe and reliable portal for employees to report mistakes, compliance issues, and quality concerns, many don’t have the infrastructure to support and encourage employee engagement, which can lead to hidden risks that can hurt performance. One of the company’s key requirements was to enable the entire workforce to anonymously report safety concerns and ensure safety was a company-wide initiative with a top-down commitment.

Identify root cause of issues – Today, corrective action functionality funnels all SMS data into root cause analysis and corrective action processes to allow the manufacturer’s engineering teams to assess key safety issues and resolve them far earlier in the product life cycle, limiting project delays and reducing remediation costs. The manufacturer can allocate resources more efficiently, and corrective action cases are tracked from the moment they’re reported until their resolution.

Summary

Automating and integrating SMS and QMS systems, contextualizing data analysis, streamlining operations, and increasing employee engagement are just a few of the ways aircraft manufacturers can ensure they’re incorporating safety and quality into every aspect of operations. This focus not only helps meet regulatory requirements, but also ensures the safety and well-being of those who rely on safe and reliable aircraft transport.

ETQ

About the author: David Isaacson is vice president of product marketing, ETQ.