Purpose of Aviation SMS Software
When the Australians and Canadians started creating their aviation safety management systems, most had little idea regarding how much data would be generated from this safety system. Furthermore, there were no commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products that were developed specifically for the aviation industry that addressed the ICAO requirements until 2008, which is when SMS Pro was released.
We don't mean to imply that every operator, maintenance organization or aerodrome needs an enterprise-level safety management software suite. Many operators can make due with tools at hand, such as MS Word documents, MS Excel spreadsheets, MS Access databases and MS SharePoint content management systems. When organizations become more complex, or have severe human resource limitations, then they will need automated software tools to collect data using hazard reporting forms, send automated notifications, generate automated canned reports and offer a secure, centralized database that can be accessed by the entire organization, regardless of whether the aviation organization is scattered across several countries.
Time and again, we have seen operators with 40 to 300 employees struggling with their paper based systems. Reports are impossible to generate with a frequency to satisfy the continuous monitoring requirements. Therefore, aviation safety management software is needed that addresses these needs.