The cost-benefit of human factors
IFA Comment: It’s good to highlight the value of pareto analysis and alike. This is core thinking in the civil aviation sector. In 1997, the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) was established in the US to evolve an “historic” approach to examining past accident data and a proactive approach that focuses on detecting risk and implementing mitigation strategies. It’s ideas were taken up in Europe and applied to creating what is now the European Plan for Aviation Safety (EPAS).
https://www.easa.europa.eu/community/topics/european-plan-aviation-safety
IRENE RUIZ-GABERNET MRAeS, Head of Safety & Compliance at Airbus Military UK, considers different methods in engaging senior management and stakeholders to invest in safety.
One of the biggest challenges for quality and safety departments can be to balance positive safety outcomes with the cost of achieving them. Treating the root cause of specific safety events or deviation from regulatory requirements may be obvious places to invest. However, there are often repetitive underlying conditions which should be mitigated but may not be considered a priority for spending safety budgets. It can be difficult to represent these less urgent safety considerations in monetary terms to senior managers, and therefore challenging to find the funding to prioritise or mitigate them. However, the financial cost of mitigating some of these underlying ‘human errors’ at later rather than earlier stages of a project or process can multiply quickly.
