Comparable to civil aviation companies - e.g. Lufthansa - the European Air Transport Command is about to implement a quality management cell in order to improve itself for future purposes.
Quality Management (QM) does not assure “good quality” by the general definition, but rather to ensure that an organization or product is consistent, improving and efficient. It can be considered to have four main components: planning, control, assurance and improvement. QM is focused not only on product- or service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. It therefore uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality.
Within the EATC the QM system will be based on the management circle: Plan, do, check and act. This allows us to systematically accomplish a plan and measure actual results against planned results, pointing out shortcomings or unused opportunities lying in the future.
It is very important to realize that QM is a tool dedicated to everyone in the EATC. It is for all the people of the EATC, where the quality manager’s role is aligned to the subject of continual improvement. He and his team will provide a powerful additional set of tools that will aid in improving our organization.
The short-term goals are to implement all the EATC processes in a so called “landscape of processes” (supported by each branch), develop a lessons learned database and complete a quality management handbook (to be released end of 2014). Together with an occurrence reporting system, a feedback system and idea management, it completes EATC quality management and provides an interesting open forum that will help the organization grow in efficiency and consistency of both processes and products.
The possible future growth in partners on one hand and years of experience currently in house on the other hand provides EATC with a great opportunity of exchanging information and lessons learned and also a standardized methodical workflow between different branches and nations. This will greatly benefit from a robust and efficient backbone quality management system.
Words by LTC Pistorius
Pictures by SIRPA Air