According to Forbes, the wearable tech market will be worth $34 billion by 2020, with experts predicting over 400 million wearable devices in use by that time.

When most of us think about wearable technology, things like Apple Watch, Fitbit and posture monitors usually come to mind. But they also have the potential to help companies improve in areas like safety and efficiency, and the aviation industry is no exception.

Today, we’re exploring how wearables can have an impact on aviation safety, from streamlining maintenance with smart glasses to preventing worker injuries.

Uber recently announced its intention to develop Uber Elevate, a new air taxi service using helicopters to transport people around cities. It plans to test the service as early as 2020 in Dallas and Dubai, but just like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, we probably can’t expect to actually use any of these futuristic technologies anytime soon.

And while these innovations make for splashy headlines, other disruptive technologies are quietly transforming aviation safety.

This post looks at how developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable devices, 3-D printing and drones will impact the aviation industry.

Many companies mistakenly believe compliance alone controls safety performance. In reality, many studies have proven that safety culture has just as much, if not more, influence on safety and operational excellence.

Leading companies that have cracked the code on creating an aviation safety culture recognize that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And like anything else, measuring safety culture depends on a robust process, asking the right questions and acting on the results.

Employee perception surveys are a primary tool many companies use to gauge safety culture, revealing hidden risks and helping pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

Aviation Safety Management System (SMS) technology has been steadily advancing over the past few years. This year, we can expect several tech trends to become more prevalent in the aviation SMS, including mobile technology, wearable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Air travel demand continues to increase worldwide, projected by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to grow by 2.6% annually for the next two decades. As more and more passengers take to the skies, the ability to consistently manage risk is likely to become a differentiating factor for companies hoping to grow (or maintain) a competitive advantage in the industry.

You can do all the audits you want and assign corrective actions until the cows come home, but unless your aviation Safety Management System (SMS) incorporates the essential element of risk, you’re missing the point.

Reducing risk to individuals, and really the organization as a whole, is the entire purpose of an SMS. And yet, most companies still tend to look at risk management from a siloed perspective, with only 20 percent integrating risk management data with other business systems.

This post looks at essential places to integrate risk into your SMS, helping you shift from reactive approaches focused on past incidents to proactive strategies that help prevent them.

If you’re like many people out there in the market, you’ve been confronted with the “cloud.” It has moved well beyond the trend phase, becoming a reality of today’s business. Moving solutions to the cloud is a valid option for many, yet there are still some gray areas surrounding the cloud discussions.

Each software solution looks at the cloud differently, which creates confusion for the organization looking to deploy. There are many ways to build a cloud, but the key to selecting the right one is finding solutions that favor the customer rather than just the vendor.

Vendors continually push the concept of multi-tenancy, or hosting multiple customers on a single cloud, as a viable option for the customer.

However, there is a hidden reality of multi-tenancy that isn’t regularly confessed by these vendors—and it is critical for organizations when making decisions.

U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that the aviation industry has an incidence rate more than double that of private industry. Making progress towards reducing worker injuries requires strategies that go beyond the surface of incident reporting, leveraging all the data available to prevent future occurrences.

One way companies can do this is by incorporating risk management into their incident reporting processes. Risk adds a new dimension to the data, giving you more information that helps you better analyze, prioritize and solve problems.

Let’s look at a few key areas where aviation companies can make incident reporting a risk-based process.

Since 1998, the aviation industry and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have reduced the fatality risk of air travel by a full 83 percent. The FAA’s goal is to cut that risk in half by 2025, one reason why the agency is requiring most commercial airlines to implement a Safety Management System (SMS) by 2018.

Achieving such ambitious safety goals calls for more than just a “check the box” approach, requiring companies take a hard look at whether or not their SMS is truly effective.

With that in mind, this post offers a variety of metrics you can use to measure SMS effectiveness.

Companies tend to view safety and sustainability in isolation from one another. It’s only natural, given that safety is largely a regulatory mandate while sustainability is more often treated like a marketing campaign.

But the truth is, companies that operate unsustainably are more likely to have safety problems, just as you would expect companies with a poor safety record to have weak sustainability performance.

Ultimately, both safety and sustainability are important if companies want to achieve operational excellence. In this post, we’ll look at the connections between safety, sustainability and operational excellence, highlighting how integration of safety and sustainability efforts is an effective strategy for achieving operational excellence.