Improve safety culture and make reporting easier
David Young 
Date published: Jun 15, 17
If we would like to improve our safety reporting culture we need to make it as simple and accessible as possible: easier for your people to access, easier for your people to find, easier for your people to manage and to do, easier for you to gain timely insight, easier for your people to report.
I spent many years around airport operations and many years engaged in the myriad of procedures and policies which underpin the countless challenges required to launch a network airline into the air day after day.
Like me, many will recall a time when customers arrived at airports with multi coupon paper air tickets, issued by travel agents, handed in for collection and processed by a willing administrative backroom legion. Many of you simply have no reference to such an obviously outdated process; making me feel old.
Should the approach to safety and quality change?
Today transactions are complete in an electronic instant. Purchase, acceptance, done. Channel shift was achieved because of commercial and competitive priorities, so here is my thought... Safety and quality – your core proposition – need that be any different? I am sure you agree it should be efficient, making use of technology and aiding your people in their roles.
Having embarked upon a beneficial tour of many of our key aviation customers, it seems clear the simplest processes can be the ones which give the greatest challenge. It’s a broad subject, so let me think about one aspect - your reporting culture. Put simply, paper reporting exists, systems do not necessarily talk to each other and delivery is not always seamless. Not everyone in every organisation is engaged.
The need to make reporting a simple and easily accessible process open to all, is fundamental. You need it to be as accessible and efficient as you can make it. All successful organisations want to create a just environment, an ethos and climate which allows your staff, your colleagues, your service partners and your customers to feel enabled to report what they see in a positive, constructive light, supporting a never-ending process of continuous improvement and safety oversight.
In recent months, the creativity being employed by our customers is hugely encouraging and shares a common thread; make reporting simple, widen the audience or, as a minimum, offer a choice of reporting platforms.
Here are three examples from my customers:
- One operator has taken Ideagen Quality Control web reporting and sought to use the application so that customer can give direct feedback, this is an excellent development and will lead to better two-way communication.
- Another customer with global reach has made a simple report available to allow the possibility of real time, in the moment reports to suppliers who may have been more used to paper and email which is less efficient.
- Organisations have also expanded the use of our multipurpose single app. This has given customers an open door for its employees in three continents to significantly improve their response rate.
Define your reporting process
Other airlines are integrating their FDM systems to ensure they are capturing reports directly when given tolerances are exceeded. This acts as a direct channel to SMS, increasing the pace of response through a simple efficiency. As a growing volume of customers will confirm, ECCAIRS formatted submissions help you meet obligated reporting requirements under EU/376, an obvious labour saving benefit for your safety team.
Staff engage, customers and delivery partners engage, you win immediately through efficiency when steps are removed from the process.
At your disposal, whether an existing customer or new to our products, we want to help you define your reporting processes, improve the data captured (including pictures, locations, etc) and, where necessary, take your reporting away from a paper process, system to system approach to a real time, simple information rich solution, scalable for your operation.
Your peers are investing in getting their reporting right. From there the benefit flows. Link to our risk product and the detail of where your operational challenges are coming can be analysed and addressed. Connected to our documents module, the increasing volume and quality of reporting enables evidence based evaluation of operating procedures and the refinement needed.
If you have the slightest doubt that your process of reporting would welcome refinement, let us know.
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