The great SMS conumdrum. Everyone can take a fair guess at describing safety and management, but in all the volumes of material produced over the last decade regarding Aviation SMS, I have yet to find a description of the 3rd comoponent - "System".
I eventually figured a model out for myself (took about 5 years and some false starts), and once I did, life got much easier. For an industry that is rife with plagarism, I am sitting on the fine detail for the time being. However in outline I will share this with you.... I grouped safety items into three areas, Organisation, Risk Management and Hazard information, and broke the business down into 4 domains, Ground ops, Flight ops, Cabin, and Maintenance. You then apply ORG, RM and HAZ across those domains. This then gives you a matrix that you can populate with all the "Tools" in your safety toolbox.
F'rinstance in Org you put safety policies, company organigrams, and so on (information that doesn't change very much) in RM this is the busiest bit with all of your tangible activities of Audits, investigations, safety databases, emergency response, risk assessments and so on. Finally HAZ is information and feedback to all levels of the organisation, in a format appropriate to a 3 level audience (Workforce,Management,Directors), which is all of the output from RM, which initself has beeen defined by what you put in Org - Simples !
All of this lends itself very easily to putting all of your sms activity on a web page/Intranet (which I eventually did) and suddenly it all worked. Needs a bit of thought on how you do that, and what content is public (staff) domain and private (management) domain.
Once you reach this stage, everything is done by "clickology", and when it comes to being audited by external agencies (CAA's etc) and they say show me xxx in your safety management system, then I go "click" on anyone of a number of headings - Happiness prevails, and I will never go back to trying to run a paper based SMS without any defined "System" in place.
The sms is now entirely visible and transparent to anyone that wants to take a look, at anytime, from anywhere. It is logically ordered, and any new initiative/buzz word/latest mousetrap (from ICAO, CAA etc) will always fall into one of the three categories. With the caveat that this is not public domain material, and that appropriate levels of IT security are applied, something else you need to consider if you go down this route for your company "Systemised" SMS.
So there you go, just one persons take on the last "S" of SMS, and what I did to put something in place.
BS