Belgium’s flagship carrier, Brussels Airlines, has introduced a new piece of integrated software that will streamline its delivery of quality and safety procedures through a risk-based performance monitoring management system.
Currently, Brussels Airlines operate 49 aircraft and has 3,500 employees, including a ‘Safety Services Department’ with a focus on continuous improvement to safety and operations as well as the anticipation and management of risk.
By working with Ideagen Gael Ltd, the carrier is implementing the Gael Insight suite of software solutions in order to transform its safety and operational performance for the better. The Suite of products includes Q-Pulse, Gael Risk and Performance Monitor which work in tandem to help aviation organisations achieve operational excellence through efficient safety and risk management and in depth performance indicators.
Adriaan Charlet, the airline’s Safety Services Manager, commented: “The Gael Insight suite has provided us with much better efficiency in investigating safety issues. The risk management and performance monitoring capabilities in particular have been extremely beneficial for us. Risk in particular was a very important part of the overall solution – not only because we can focus on the safety issues – but also enhance our operational risk assessments. For example, nowadays we are able to carry specific cargo that requires to be handled with care thanks to being able to risk assess it and feed the results back into the system.”
He continued: “Performance monitoring is the link between safety and efficiency. In the past we gathered information ourselves manually from a variety of different databases. However now, thanks to being able to monitor performance of the business through a series of KPIs, we are able to view all of that data in a blink of an eye in one central portal. We don’t need to search or look for this ourselves, the system does this for us and tells us what areas require extra attention or is performing well.”
Dirk Adriaenssens, who oversees Brussels Airlines’ Safety & Compliance Monitoring Department, said: “The Suite provides us with one, simplified solution to manage all of our safety and compliance monitoring activities. The solution gives us full integration of all safety issues for all departments and is also able to integrate with existing interfaces – such as our flight data monitoring system or our scheduling software – for a complete safety product.
“The largest benefit we’ve seen is that it can be used online and offline and provides us with higher efficiencies in that we now don’t have to duplicate a lot of our tasks and data. This encourages the same working methods throughout the organisation in regards to capturing safety and operational issues and other forms of data.”
Mr Adriaenssens concluded: “We are now capturing safety issues more easily and working more proactively as we can detect hazards in advance even better. This has helped us not only improve safety even more here at Brussels Airlines, but has increased efficiency as everyone is using and becoming knowledgeable in one tool.”
In April, Brussels Airlines announced that passenger numbers rose by 11.5 percent mainly due to the introduction of new destinations. Part of the Lufthansa Group, the airline also celebrated its five year membership with Star Alliance in December 2014. Equipped with the right safety software and expertise, these are two key factors that are sure to contribute to the overall growth of the Airline and ensure operational excellence.
