Santa’s Run 2017
Merry Christmas from CatalinaNJB
Santa is getting ready for another
journey of delivering gifts all over the world. Over the many years that Santa
has delivered, he has experienced incidents and mishaps, but never had a
serious accident that would stop him from providing excellence in customer
service. Some years ago, Santa implemented the Streamlined Mission Service
(SMS) in an attempt to reduce the mishaps and incidents. Most of these mishaps
happened on rooftops as the reindeers came in for landing hitting a chimney or
had a rooftop excursion. Over the years the gifts had become more sensitive to
these incidents compared to the old-days when gifts were more robust, and an
incident didn’t do any damages. The SMS was sold to Santa with a promise that
when fully implemented he would have fewer incidents than he ever had before.
Since Santa had only managed safety
on-the-fly, he had concern about the new way of SMS, but he reluctantly
implemented it and was looking forward to many seasons with fewer incidents, which
didn’t happen. When reviewing the previous years, Santa had more incidents per
landing than ever before. He was disappointed; SMS had not followed through
with the promise of fewer incidents. He was determined to put the SMS on the
Elves-Shelf and totally dismiss SMS forever. So, instead of preparing for a
safer journey this time, he sat down with a good book about the history of
flight.
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Even with an SMS in
place there were unforeseen variables.
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Well, Santa had flown his reindeer
long time before any person invented the airplane. Except that nobody seen
Santa and his reindeers flying, they just seen the tracks after he had left the
gifts. As he was reading something
caught his eyes: Safety Management System was not new to aviation, but started
in 1903 with the first flight. Back then, SMS was all reactive and safety was
not improved until after an accident had happened. For the first 100 years or
so, SMS in aviation was reactive processes and applied to Technical Systems
only. With the implementation of SMS, Aviation Safety became proactive and was
applied to the Human Factors System. Interesting thought Santa and said to
himself that this almost makes sense. He was determined to learn more about
what SMS actually is, and if it could be a useful tool to improve his
gift-delivery customer service safety record.
As he continued reading the book, he
realized that by stepping back from the operations itself and enter into a
parallel virtual world, he could review operations from the sideline. He sat
down on the fence and just observed his operations during the many previous
decades of deliveries.
Hour after hour he sat and observed
previous missions and discovered that he had been operating with a Streamlined
Mission Service (SMS) ever since he started the operations. Over the years
improvements were made to the operations for safer transportation and higher
quality of customer service. One major improvement was when the lead reindeer,
Rudolph, received the red nose. The red nose became a requirement after a
near-miss with another flying reindeer and should help for collision avoidance
with other flying creatures. When they see the red-nose they would be able to
tell by that red-nose that Santa was coming their way. The only reason for the
red colored light was that this was the only colored light-bulb Santa could
find in his film and picture development room.
But it worked. He discovered that since that time there were fewer
incidents per approaches and departures than ever before. Santa had discovered
the true SMS, which is that SMS is not the magic wand to prevent incidents, but
two separate systems to be applied as safety tools.
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| After a long day of deliveries, Santa and the reindeers took the flight home |
One system is as a parallel system
to the operations with a purpose to observe the quality of operations and
collect data and the second is as a system for continuous improvement to the
reindeers’ Hoof Factors (HF) system. By improving the quality of the hooves,
the reindeers could focus better on the quality of landing surfaces and landing
spots than have to worry on the damages to their low-resistance hooves upon
landing and during critical phases of flight. By applying he HF system, Santa was
able to change the reindeers’ safety-culture, which had been to force more
hoof-weight onto the other reindeers in the group. With the SMS each reindeer was
accepting their individual accountability to distribute the landing-force
evenly to all hooves.
After learning more about SMS, Santa
changes his opinion about SMS and realized that it is not how many incidents
that can be avoided, but how each mission is a mission to continuously improve
safety.
By this discovery Santa was prepared
for another year of world-wide gift delivery. In addition to improve safety, he
discovered that improving safety actually had improved his customer service by
more on-time deliveries and fewer hours in the shop to repair the HF
system.
When Santa calculated the return of
customer service satisfaction, he applied the formula of the continuous
improvement factor and apply this factor in other areas of the operations.
Santa hurried back to Mrs. Santa and
the Elves and presented his discoveries. They were all excited and supporting
Santa in that it’s not the utopia of perfect deliveries that counts, but how
every year becomes an operational safety improvement. Also, Santa understood
that the SMS sales-gimmick of magically having fewer incidents was not intended
to be wrong information, but just that the elves who sold him on SMS did not
have any practical SMS experience.
CATALINANJB
