Flyboy said:
Dear friends
I have recently been nominated as Quality Manager of an airline. My experience in aviation is quite extensive but in Quality Management I have had little experience. I was very inerested to read a lot of your comments on various quality issues. I am trying to get a broad view of how Quality and Safety can or cannot work together. I would appreciate all your comments (especially if any airline people are reading this) on the following.
Can quality and safety go hand in hand or can one restrict the other?
Shall I be pushing qulity - and safety will follow or vise versa?
If they should be kept separetly can one comlement the other and how?
Thanks
Flyboy
Something I want to ask, however obtuse it may seem, is this: Safety for the internal customers, external customers or both?
External customers (passengers) is obvious; a desirable outcome and evidence of "goodness" or "fitness for use". Both are historic definitions of
quality. In this respect, safety and quality are inextricably linked as passenger safety is surely on top of your list of success metrics.
Arguably the safety of internal customers (airline employees) is also a powerful contributor to your success. Onboard Navy vessels, before each section of steam piping was removed we would test a lagging sample for asbestos. Our workers' long term health, and the long term health of customer sailors was equally important as the ships' deployment schedule. The asbestos absence must be assured, or it
must be removed according to procedure
before the repairs could take place. Similarly we took great pains to ensure safe procedures were followed while repairs of other sensitive items took place, like oxygen valves on submarines. Long term results were given the same weight as short term results. Our results were excellent; ships usually sailed on time due to good planning, but also there was not much costly rework because of all that in-process care and accidents due to systems failure were few. I miss that devotion to excellence in my work...
Do you see what I mean? When your objectives include more than meeting schedules, but also a sparkling safety record, and comfort for your passengers, your airline can enjoy a good reputation as a quality service provider.
There is a good deal of human action in an airline's processes. Freedom from workplace illness among your employees, good housekeeping for industrial hygienic health and fewer injuries at work, good morale for maximum concentration and devotion to duty and other seemingly peripheral considerations will doubtlessly contribute to the main objective: planes consistently come down in as good condition as they went up.
I can think of very few industries where safety and quality would be less closely linked.