CHC has always been proud of its single, world-wide system for incident reporting, but how can that data be used to benefit customers and the company? It is critical to have the right data and we start by measuring things that are important to customers, to safety, and to the growth of the company. These Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) are an essential part of our system that manages safety.

In the past, the Safety & Quality Integrated Database (SQID) system has been used to track the rate of reporting in terms of raw numbers of reports submitted. Having the SQID system as the sole reporting system in the Integrated Safety Management System makes it a one-stop shop for data and it can be used to cut data in a number of different ways: by aircraft type; by business unit; by base; by calendar period, etc.
“Raw numbers only tell part of the story and if we were going to compare ‘rates’ of reporting or event trends, we needed to have a known metric such as flying or labour hours to allow an equal comparison of statistics,” said Duncan Trapp, Director of Safety & Quality, European Operations. “SQID initially had some comparative information but, for a variety of reasons, it was not complete and so the results were effectively unusable.”

In addition to the aforementioned issue, whilst the SQID system gave clear results of searches on criteria such as Top 10 or Top 20 keywords, it didn’t easily link the results to the events that contributed.
This led to a time-consuming trawl through the reports to identify common themes in order to develop suitable strategies to prevent recurrences.
“Despite the many hours required to do this analysis, Mike Davis did some great work for Global Operations,” said Trapp. “Mike was the main provider of analysed data for GO on a monthly basis.”

When it was realized, by the Safety & Quality team, that SQID could not provide the information needed, it became clear that a new process needed to be developed. As a consequence, members of the Safety & Quality team engaged in developing ‘the CUBE’, which combined SQID reports, flying and labour hours with an analysis tool that now allows the S&Q team to cut and rearrange data at the touch of a button, and more importantly, it links quickly to the actual reports that feed these stats. All important ‘detail’ is now at the fingertips of CHC employees.

“Trevor Paterson and Lori Lemay were key players in the development and creation of the SQID CUBE and provided the insight as to what was trying to be achieved,” said Trapp. “Trevor has also done an incredible amount of work in its post roll-out development to make it more automated and easier to refresh the data each time we want to update it.”

As a result, CHC now have accurate KPIs which allow employees to track progress across a whole range of areas. We now know that reporting rates continue to be healthy and we can use this data to compare all the way down to individual bases. We are also now able to measure the effectiveness of how we deal with the several thousand reports we get each year; closure rate targets have been set to ensure that the root causes of the reported events are identified in a timely manner (normally through the Occurrence Review Board). Where targets are not met, the CUBE allows us to drill into the system and find out where the pinch points might be, allowing us to allocate time and resources to fixing the pinch point rather than trying to apply a ‘fix’ to a much wider area.

“The desire to develop meaningful KPIs which could shape the way we did business and improve our safety, was the driver behind the CUBE,” said Trapp. “Now that we have refined the KPIs and we have the means to support them, we know our business better than we ever have. That knowledge allows us to better focus our efforts in driving down the risk.”