Documenting the Safety Management System

Principally there are at least couple of ways of documenting the SMS. Either the approach can be set out in one or more artefacts to which the individual CRM project documents refer or the process can be explained in the CRM project deliverables themselves. Each method has its merits depending on the nature of the project. 

Where an organisation has a single product which is regularly subject to CRM activities, it is not unreasonable to discuss the CRM methodology exclusively in the safety case itself. In this way, each section of the report essentially reads as  

Finally, the development of a rigorous SMS can be a valuable asset to an organisation. Wrapping this intellectual property inside a safety case (which can have a wide distribution) may disclose this asset to a wider audience that would otherwise be desirable. 

The adopted approach should therefore be carefully thought through taking these issues into account. In the main, if an organisation intends to implement any more than a couple of brief safety cases, it is probably worth investing in creating a set of dedicated documents which describe the CRM process from start to finish and have separate documentation which sets out the result of applying the process to each HIT product. 

In terms of SMS content, the documentation should at a minimum contain the following  

---