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With this guide you will:

• Understand what a Risk Control is and why it sits at the centre of your SMS
• See how the bow-tie model connects every hazard, incident, NCR, policy and procedure back to a control
• Know the full set of fields Hubfleet captures on each control
• Recognise what makes a "good" control
• Understand how Risk Controls move through their lifecycle and how effectiveness is tracked </aside>

A Risk Control is a measure your operation has put in place to manage a specific safety risk. Controls are not risks themselves — they are your response to risks. They are the actions, procedures, systems, equipment, training and supervision that either prevent something going wrong or respond when something does.

In Hubfleet, Risk Controls are designed to sit at the centre of the Safety Management System. Hazards, incidents, NCRs, policies, procedures and training types can all be linked back to one or more controls — but only when you make those links. Linking is optional and manual; the system doesn't propagate it automatically. The discipline of building those links is what turns a library of controls into a working SMS and a defensible audit trail.

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Scope. This page explains the concept of Risk Controls, their anatomy and how Hubfleet tracks effectiveness. For the practical how-to — creating, editing, moving to Active and linking controls — see Creating and Managing Risk Controls.

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The bow-tie model

Hubfleet's SMS is built on a bow-tie model, with Risk Controls at the centre knot. Every control has two sides, both visible directly on the Risk Control record.

Hubfleet bow-tie model: preventive controls on the left, Risk Control at the centre knot, reactive responses on the right

Preventive Links — the left of the bow-tie. The things in place to stop incidents happening:

• Policies & Procedures — the policies that mandate the control and the procedures that implement it
• Hazards Addressed — the hazards the control is designed to manage
• Required Training — the training each person needs to be qualified to execute the control

Reactive Links — the right of the bow-tie. The events that capture how the control performs in real life:

• Incidents linked to this control when something has gone wrong
• NCRs raised against this control when it's been breached or proves inadequate
• Hazards (Field-Reported) linked when a field-reported hazard has surfaced a gap the control should have closed

The bow-tie is what makes the audit trail work — but only when the links exist. An auditor can follow any thread — say, a closed incident — back through the NCR, back to the control that failed, back to the policy that mandated it, and forward to the corrective action that fixed it, provided each of those links has been made. Every link in the chain is a deliberate act by the user.

For the full SMS architecture this sits inside, see Safety Management System.

The anatomy of a Risk Control

Every Risk Control in Hubfleet carries the same set of fields, visible on the Risk Control detail view.