Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Understanding User Dashboard Chart - Reporting Culture in Aviation Safety Software

Current Reporting Culture as of Today

Understanding your current reporting culture is an important exercise for any airline or airport safety manager. What perceptions toward your aviation safety management goals and objectives do airline and airport personnel currently hold? A question recently appeared regarding one of the new User Dashboard charts in SMS Pro's aviation safety management software. See the User Dashboard chart below:
Airline Airport occurrence Reporting Culture in aviation safety management systems software


Question: what does maximum 26 issues reported in 7 days relate to?

SMS Pro Fails to Make Intuitive Dashboard Charts

Airline Airport Hazard Reporting Culture in aviation safety management systems software
SMS Pro routinely creates new aviation safety software tools for airline and airport SMS programs. One measure of our success is when users intuitively understand the functionality or purpose of tools without further documentation. In this case, we failed and hope to explain this very useful dashboard chart. If you want to see the user-configurable dashboard to which this chart belongs, see User Configurable Dashboard in Aviation Safety Management Software

Explanation of Real Time Hazard Reporting Culture Chart

At the bottom of this aviation SMS charting tool are three radio buttons corresponding to three different result sets. The default selection is "7 Days." One can easily get another result set to fill the gauge and legend by selecting another option, such as "Month" or "Year."

For the current date the above aviation SMS chart was displayed to the user, 13 issues had been reported within the past 7 days. Result sets come from real time data and can change throughout the day. For the life of this particular aviation SMS portal, the maximum number of reported hazards (issues), not counting audit issues, for any given "7-day" time period was 26.

Reporting Culture Dashboard Chart Pulls Fresh Data on Demand

As mentioned, upon selecting "Month" or "Year," the legend changes to reflect:

  • How many issues were reported within the "Selected Time Period;" and
  • What is the maximum number of reported issues for the history of the portal for any "Selected Time Period."

Use Caution & Common Sense When Interpreting Hazard Reporting Data

The displayed metrics in this chart offer an indication of the current reporting culture in relation to the life of your SMS program. Several factors may affect these result for any given period, for example:

  • Safety promotion newsletters increasing awareness and motivating employees to submit issues;
  • Allowing contractors and customers to submit hazards and quality concerns using email and public hazard reporting tools;
  • Providing aviation SMS training to airline or airport employees; and
  • Organizational restructuring that causes sudden increase or decrease in number of active employees.


As with any data result, one has to be careful as to how you interpret this "snap shot" of your aviation SMS program. If a manager suddenly enters a large stack of paper-based reports, the result set will appear skewed.

Reporting culture using aviation safety management software
We hope the above explanation satisfies any questions to the this User Dashboard chart. There are more than 20 User Dashboard charts in SMS Pro's user configurable dashboard. If you have any questions regarding other reports, please contact us and we'll provide a detailed explanation.

To see the configurable dashboard in action, follow this link:
http://aviationsafetysoftware.blogspot.com/2013/11/aviation-sms-software-configurable.html

Thank you for supporting SMS Pro and making SMS Pro one of the best aviation safety management software tools on the market. To learn more about aviation safety management software tools, see http://www.asms-pro.com





About NWDS - founded in 2003 by six software engineers, NorthWest Data Solutions (NWDS) provides custom computer programming and systems design services. NWDS creates many types of software, including e-commerce, financial, defense, engineering, logistics, aviation and more. In 2007, NWDS developed SMS Pro™ a web based SMS application that supports an organization's overall SMS through safety reporting, safety documentation, safety risk management and safety assurance. SMS Pro™ is currently used by aviation organizations in the U.S., Canada, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East to help manage their SMS programs. NWDS continues to support SMS Pro™ and add new functionality. NWDS offers custom contract programming services in the U.S. and Canada and is managed by Chris Howell, one of the founders. Their headquarters is in Anchorage, Alaska. For information on NWDS visit their website at www.nwds-ak.com and www.asms-pro.com to learn more about SMS Pro™.