It’s not a secret: Operational compliance is time and resource consuming. It takes months for the airline and operation to compile data that satisfies a regulator’s request to see where standards are answered in the manuals.
So what’s the “secret” to not just reducing, but eliminating, this drain on your operation? It’s to take a new approach: Instead of preparing for an operational safety audit for airlines when it happens, enable your airline to always be audit-ready.
Separate Systems Create Inefficient Audit Preparation
If you’re anything like most airlines, the entire organization is involved in audit preparation. The technical publications department spends 20 percent of their time preparing for audits, and other groups, like SMEs and safety and compliance officers, also devote significant time to audit prep. Standards catalogues for different regulations have to be recorded in different systems and then referenced in the manuals before being logged into an Excel spreadsheet. Managing these catalogues and monitoring new and updated standards is also done manually. This style of preparing for an operational safety audit for airlines is rife with inefficiencies in the form of extra effort to ensure communication among stakeholders, toggle between separate sources of information, and of course, recording thousands of standards traces all at once.
Technical publications authors spend several months manually creating the spreadsheet with all the traces, and meanwhile, revisions they don’t have time to complete stack up – depriving content users, such as pilots and flight attendants, the updates they need to operate safely and efficiently.
One Platform Streamlines Standards Management and Enables Audit-Readiness
An integrated approach increases efficiency while effectively managing standards. One platform houses all standards from all regulators so that they can be traced to all OEM and company manuals. Additionally, this same system provides notifications signaling when a standard has changed. Because all the stakeholders involved, authors, safety and compliance officers, and SMEs, are using the same system, they all receive the same information at the same time and can easily collaborate using a common editor when they decide a standard change warrants a revision. And when authors update manuals based on an updated standard, they can add individual standards traces to specific sections of content when the revision is complete. This enables audit preparation to become part of the authoring process instead of a separate process in itself.
With this approach, the only thing left to do in response to an audit is to run a standards tracing report – giving people across your organization months of time back to focus on their individual roles, which support safety and efficiency across the operation.
That’s how and why it’s possible to always be audit-ready. To see specific use cases of an integrated approach to the audit process and how it improves airline operations beyond the technical publications department, watch the on-demand webinar: The Approach to Compliance that Improves Operations Across the Airline.
