I am a huge proponent of building a safety process, formally called a Safety Management System, that establishes some critical indicators of how well the process functions. This is done in the same spirit as how a business measures its production, quality, costs, etc. But as we all know, anything that gets measured WITHOUT VALIDATION can be manipulated. Even “leading indicators” can become a numbers game, hence the CRITICAL role of our QA/QC function and the data validation we do within this element of the SMS. There is a fine line we must walk between the quantity of activity and the quality of those activities. And unfortunately, this fine line is like walking a tightrope that is very loose and has many twists and turns along the way; hence the crucial role of validating the numbers and quality.
