OGL Engineering is committed to the safety of its employees, clients, and the public. One of the measures we have taken to uphold this value was to implement a Safety Management System (SMS) which is used to promote a positive safety culture, identify safety concerns, reduce risks, and improve overall safety of our organization. In Canada and the US, Transport Canada and the FAA does not require an SMS for aerial survey organizations, but they require an SMS for airline operations, airline maintenance organizations, and airports. Although we are not required by Transport Canada to have an SMS, we voluntarily created one that meets the same requirements of the airlines. We chose to do this because of our strong commitment to a positive safety culture.
One of the benefits of an SMS is an improved safety culture. Our SMS is supported by the highest level of management, and everyone is encouraged to participate. An integral feature of our SMS is that it has a non-punitive reporting policy to encourage hazard identification and reporting by all team members. The hazard identification process takes a proactive approach to mitigating issues and hazards that may impact our operations. We are committed to the SMS system to ensure our clients can rely on our operations to be safe and efficient, resulting in their projects being delivered on time.
An SMS also reduces our costs of operations, which is passed on to our clients. We are able to reduce costs from incidents by avoiding them in the first place. Indirect costs from an incident can include the cost of lost use of equipment, increased insurance premiums, time lost by injured or sick employees, loss of business and loss of reputation both inside of the company and externally. Maintaining an SMS also allows us to improve our processes by identifying and reducing inefficiencies, which leads to faster turnaround times for our clients.
Having an SMS helps us work efficiently with other safety conscious organizations. An increasing number of businesses that require aerial survey work will only work with vendors that have an SMS because it is a sure way to know that the work will be completed as safely as possible. Since the SMS already has a quality assurance component that includes annual internal audits, passing an external inspection process becomes simple, speeding up the pre-acquisition portion of the project.
In the end, implementing SMS at OGL enhances safety, improves efficiencies, and allows us to work with more businesses that value safety conscious partners. If your organization would benefit from aerial survey, or any if you have any other geospatial needs we would be happy to help! Get in touch with us to get started.
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