Communicating With Vendors, Suppliers, Tenants in Aviation Safety Management Software
Vendors, contractors, suppliers and tenants share the same operating environment as airlines and airports. These same vendors or suppliers may also be acting as agents for your airline or airport. Having the ability to communicate quickly to your vendors helps your aviation organization minimize risk and also improves relations with your vendors.
In most cases today, vendor communication is conducted by conventional mail, which is very slow and time consuming to document. Having tools to save time and money communicating risks and other information is another benefit of using SMS Pro.
Vendor Message Acknowledgement is used to communicate to vendors, suppliers, contractors and tenants using email. Once the email is sent, a link is included in the email for vendors to click which indicates the receipt of the message. Attachments, such as policy changes, contract modifications and other safety related information can be included in these messages.
In most cases, vendors, suppliers and contractors do not have access to your aviation safety management system using a username and password. Without a username and password, they are not able to acknowledge messages in other SMS Pro modules, such as the Message Board. Because vendors do not have access to your aviation SMS software program, Vendor Message Acknowledgement facilitates the delivery of emailed messages and documents their receipt to prove to auditors or others that vendors did receive your communications.
With conventional email, a message is sent and unless the recipient responds, you have no way to know that the person received your message. Furthermore, you have no easy way to document and prove in a simple report all the vendors or suppliers that have read or not read your messages.
SMS Pro's Vendor Message Acknowledgement allows managers to create a message directed to particular categories of vendors or to individually selected vendors. The message may have optional attachments. When managers send the message, the selected vendors are sent an email with a link inside the email message to click, thereby sending a message to SMS Pro that the message has been received.
Reports can be easily generated to determine who has received or not received the messages. For those who have not yet acknowledged receipt, a simple mouse click will send a reminder message to those who have not yet acknowledged receipt.
There are times when you need to prove to auditors that your external stakeholders are part of your safety program. For example, how do you perform safety promotion activities to vendors who are not a part of your safety program? And how do you prove that it is effective? This is one reason you should use Vendor Message Acknowledgement.
Another compelling reason to use Vendor Message Acknowledgement is to document that vendors have received important contractual information changes or your safety policy changes. Vendor Message Acknowledgement is an easy to use module. You can easily select vendors by classifications and easily generate reports for management to prove that your communication channels are open and working in your aviation safety management system with external stakeholders.
Any safety manager or department head may want to communicate to vendors and have the safety system document these transactions. General users do not have permissions to view vendor messages or their associated reports. Vendor Message Acknowledgement module is reserved for managers and SMS executives.
If you are familiar with the Message Board in SMS Pro, then you will not have any problems understanding how Vendor Message Acknowledgement works. The first step is to select the vendors you wish to communicate with. You may select them by category, such as fuel provider, aircraft cleaning, etc., or you may individually select vendors from a list that is pulled from the Vendor Management module.
After selecting the vendors, you simply add a subject and the body of the message. Save your message draft. Saving the message draft does not send the email messages. You must physically indicate that your message is ready for publishing before any email messages are sent. You must also save the message at least once before you are able to add attachments.
After sending the message, you simply sit back and wait for a reasonable amount of time for the vendors to respond. You may schedule a review in your calendar to follow up on these messages. By going to the reports tab, you can see who responded and the corresponding date/time of the response. A button exists to email a reminder to those who have thus far failed to acknowledge your message.
Vendor messages are typically sent when safety information needs to be communicated to vendors, suppliers and contractors. Airports also include tenants in this group. Whenever you announce a policy change to employees, and this change either directly or indirectly affects your vendors, you should use the Vendor Message Acknowledgement module.
The Vendor Message Acknowledgement module is dependent on Vendor Management module More information about the Vendor Management module is below.