Zoekresultaten

Review of existing aviation safety metrics

Evaluating the horizontal alignment of safety management activities through cross-reference of data from safety audits, meetings and investigations

Vertical and horizontal alignment within organizations are seen as prerequisites for meeting strategic objectives and indications of effective management. In the area of safety management, the concept of vertical alignment has been followed through the introduction of hierarchical structures and bidirectional communication, but horizontal alignment has been given little attention. The principal goal of this study was the assessment of horizontal alignment within an aviation organization with the use of data from safety investigations, audits and meetings in order to explore the extent to which (1) causal factors recorded in safety investigation reports comprised topics discussed by safety committees and focus areas of internal safety auditors, and (2) the agendas of safety committees include weak points revealed during safety audits. The study employed qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected over a 6 years’ period at three organizational levels. The results suggested a low horizontal alignment across the three pairs of the corresponding safety management activities within each organizational level. The findings were attributed to the inadequacy of procedures and lack of a safety information database for consistently sharing safety information, cultural factors and lack of planning for the coordination of safety management activities. The current research comprises a contribution to the literature and practice and introduces a technique to assess the intra-alignment of safety management initiatives within various organizational levels. Future research is needed in order to investigate the association between horizontal alignment of safety management practices and safety performance.

The balance between safety and productivity and its relationship with human factors and safety awareness and communication in aircraft manufacturing

Background: This paper presents the findings of a pilot research survey which assessed the degree of balance between safety and productivity, and its relationship with awareness and communication of human factors and safety rules in the aircraft manufacturing environment.Methods: The study was carried out at two Australian aircraft manufacturing facilities where a Likertscale questionnaire was administered to a representative sample. The research instrument included topics relevant to the safety and human factors training provided to the target workforce. The answers were processed in overall, and against demographic characteristics of the sample population.Results: The workers were sufficiently aware of how human factors and safety rules influence their performance and acknowledged that supervisors had adequately communicated such topics. Safety and productivity seemed equally balanced across the sample. A preference for the former over the latter wasassociated with a higher awareness about human factors and safety rules, but not linked with safety communication. The size of the facility and the length and type of employment were occasionally correlated with responses to some communication and human factors topics and the equilibrium between productivity and safety.Conclusion: Although human factors training had been provided and sufficient bidirectional communication was present across the sample, it seems that quality and complexity factors might have influencedthe effects of those safety related practices on the safety-productivity balance for specific parts of the population studied. Customization of safety training and communication to specific characteristics of employees may be necessary to achieve the desired outcomes.

Exploiting data from safety investigations and processes to assess performance of safety management aspects

This paper presents an alternative way to use records from safety investigations as a means to support the evaluation of safety management (SM) aspects. Datasets from safety investigation reports and progress records of an aviation organization were analyzed with the scope of assessing safety management’s role, speed of safety communication, timeliness of safety investigation processes and realization of safety recommendations, and the extent of convergence among SM and investigation teams. The results suggested an interfering role of the safety department, severe delays in safety investigations, timely implementation of recommendations, quick dissemination of investigation reports to the end-users, and a low ratio of investigation team recommendations included in the final safety investigation reports. The results were attributed to non-scalable safety investigation procedures, ineffective resource management, lack of consistent bidirectional communication, lack of investigators’ awareness about the overall organizational context, and a weak commitment of other departments to the realization of safety recommendations. The set of metrics and the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods presented in this paper can support organizations to the transition towards a performance-based evaluation of safety management.

Measuring safety in aviation

As part of their SMS, aviation service providers are required to develop and maintain the means to verify the safety performance of their organisation and to validate the effectiveness of safety risk controls. Furthermore, service providers must verify the safety performance of their organisation with reference to the safety performance indicators and safety performance targets of the SMS in support of their organisation’s safety objectives. However, SMEs lack sufficient data to set appropriate safety alerts and targets, or to monitor their performance, and no other objective criteria currently exist to measure the safety of their operations. The Aviation Academy of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences therefore took the initiative to develop alternative safety performance metrics. Based on a review of the scientific literature and a survey of existing safety metrics, we proposed several alternative safety metrics. After a review by industry and academia, we developed two alternative metrics into tools to help aviation organisations verify the safety performance of their organisations.The AVAV-SMS tool measures three areas within an organisation’s Safety Management System:• Institutionalisation (design and implementation along with time and internal/external process dependencies).• Capability (the extent to which managers have the capability to implement the SMS).• Effectiveness (the extent to which the SMS deliverables add value to the daily tasks of employees).The tool is scalable to the size and complexity of the organisation, which also makes it useful for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The AVAS-SCP tool also measures three areas in the organisation’s safety culture prerequisites to foster a positive safety culture:• Organisational plans (whether the company has designed/documented each of the safety cultureprerequisites).• Implementation (the extent to which the prerequisites are realised by the managers/supervisors acrossvarious organisational levels).• Perception (the degree to which frontline employees perceive the effects of managers’ actions relatedto safety culture).We field-tested these tools, demonstrating that they have adequate sensitivity to capture gaps between Work-as-Imagined (WaI) and Work-as-Done (WaD) across organisations. Both tools are therefore useful to organisations that want to self-assess their SMS and safety culture prerequisite levels and proceed to comparisons among various functions and levels and/or over time. Our field testing and observations during the turn-around processes of a regional airline confirm that significant differences exist between WaI and WaD. Although these differences may not automatically be detrimental to safety, gaining insight into them is clearly necessary to manage safety. We conceptually developed safety metrics based on the effectiveness of risk controls. However, these could not be fully field-tested within the scope of this research project. We recommend a continuation of research in this direction. We also explored safety metrics based on the scarcity of resources and system complexity. Again, more research is required here to determine whether these provide viable solutions.

Critical review of safety performance metrics

Various tools for safety performance measurement have been introduced in order to fulfil the need for safety monitoring in organisations, which is tightly related to their overall performance and achievement of their business goals. Such tools include accident rates, benchmarking, safety culture and climate assessments, cost-effectiveness studies, etc. The current work reviews the most representative methods for safety performance evaluation that have been suggested and applied by a variety of organisations, safety authorities and agencies. This paper discusses several viewpoints of the applicability, feasibility and appropriateness of such tools, based on the viewpoints of managers and safety experts involved in a relevant research that was conducted in a large aviation organisation. The extensive literature cited, the discussion topics, along with the conclusions and recommendations derived, might be considered by any organisation that seeks a realistic safety performance assessment and establishment of effective measurement tools.