tion by focusing on four distinct areas:
• Safety Policy and Objective
• Safety Risk Management
• Safety Assurance
• Safety Promotion
StandardAero has now fully imple-
mented SMS and has been audited by
DNV, its third party ISO/AS9110 accredi-
tation entity. In addition, customers and
third-party regulatory agencies like the
FAA and Transport Canada are auditing
StandardAero regularly.
Even though these review groups are
coming in and looking at it, the official
checklist for the many SMS policies and
procedures are still being hammered out
with ICAO and others, like FAA and DNV.
“The four key aspects of SMS don’t deviate
much between ICAO, Canada, FAA and
EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency),”
said Dodd, “but there is a lot of interpreta-
tion on what each one of the four phases of
SMS exactly means.”
“When we kicked the program off,”
noted Tom Roche, vice president helicop-
ter programs, “customer input was very
important to us. We did a fair number of
interviews with some of our major com-
panies to really substantiate what their
expectations were and try to baseline
some things.” StandardAero’s customers
have been very supportive and, in many
cases, they have been very positive in their
feedback. StandardAero has been able to
effectively use its SMS process format and
the background behind the system as an
effective tool for marketing their total orga-
nization to certain customer segments.
Recently, some in the aviation community have questioned whether SMS is
really just a way for the regulators to shift
responsibility onto operators or service
providers. Dodd refutes that assertion. “I’ve
been in aviation 35 years and I have been
though ISO, AS9110, TQM (Total Quality Management) and now SMS. Here in
Maryville, Tenn., we have up to 70 audits a
year and half of those are FAA-related. So, I
can assure you, even with these new SMS
standards coming out, StandardAero will
still have these kinds of audits.
SMS looks at the enterprise as a whole,
unlike traditional control methods that
tend to focus on individual processes.
While the majority of SMS activity will
continue to be directed toward particular
specialist functions, the system is also
concerned with how those functions inter-
relate.
Leadership from the Top
The cultural shift that is integral to successful SMS implementation is said to be
possible only with leadership from the
top. StandardAero’s SMS accountable
managers, Robert Mionis and Kim Olson,
are at the pinnacle of the StandardAero
leadership hierarchy. Mionis is CEO of
Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE) Manufacturing and Engineering subsidiaries and
president & CEO of StandardAero. Olson
is StandardAero’s senior vice president of
engineering technology.
There was broad internal recognition
that changes in the StandardAero orga-
nizational culture were necessary. The
company had quite a few problem solving
tools—one of them being a continuous
improvement (CI) tool and a more formal
corrective action request system (CARS).
“We’ve integrated our SMS into these qual-
ity management tools to make sure that
when the teams on the floor identify prod-
uct safety issues,” said Dodd, “they have the
proper problem solving tools with which
to reduce the risk that was identified.”
When the SMS work got started, Stan-
dardAero launched several improvement
initiatives against the key elements of the
ICAO standard. It developed and provided
an eight-hour training initiative for every
employee within the company on continu-
ous improvement, SMS and risk mitigation
strategies. “On average,” noted Dodd, “each
business unit allows the teams to meet
once a week or once every other week,
for 30 minutes to an hour to do problem
solving.”
Defining Safety
One of the challenges StandardAero expe-
rienced during its implementation of
SMS was in the use of the word “safety.”
There was confusion about whether the
word referred to shop floor safety, product
safety or flight safety. “We had to do some
training in the different interpretations
of occupational health safety and flight
safety,” acknowledged Dodd. “Although
some of the problem solving processes may
be the same, in terms of risk identification
and risk mitigation, and some of the tools
for problem solving may be the same, we
wanted to make sure that there is a differ-
entiation between floor safety and product
and flight safety.”
Mike Turner, director of marketing and
corporate communications, picked up on
that differentiation, as well. “We do a lot to
reinforce that from an internal communi-
cations perspective through our intranet
and a number of internal communications
pieces. By utilizing our newsletter and
things like that, many of those stories are
reinforced,” said Turner.
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