Background
SOMAT started as software for aviation safety work, and it's in daily use there now. This page covers how it came about, who builds it, and what we can tell you about data and access at this stage.
Aviation
Airlines use line observation audits to understand how flights go in normal operation, away from the simulator and the check ride. A trained observer sits on the flight deck with the crew's agreement, on the understanding that nothing recorded will be used against them, and notes the threats and errors that came up and how the crew handled them.
The framework behind this is threat and error management (TEM). A threat is anything outside the crew's control that makes the flight more complicated, such as weather or a late runway change. An error is something the crew did or didn't do that took the flight away from what was intended. If either goes unmanaged, the aircraft can end up in what's called an undesired state, such as being too fast on approach, and the point of the audit is to see which of these patterns recur across many flights.
Harlow Stewart's work on SOMAT
Harlow Stewart runs line observation audits, such as HLOSA, and safety and organisational surveys, such as ISAT, for airlines. Both are carried out in SOMAT. An observer records each flight sector by sector and phase by phase, with the threat and error sequences inside them, and the airline sees the results on dashboards and in Excel reports.
The reports include charts tracing how threats led to errors and undesired states, and rates adjusted for the number of flights observed, so that fleets and bases of different sizes can be compared fairly.
The name
SOMAT is short for "Son of Matrix", after the Matrix family of assessment tools that came before it, which had their roots in NHS mental health services. SOMAT keeps the idea behind them, linking structured assessment to outcomes, and we began rebuilding it in September 2024 so that one platform could serve any sector in its own terms.
That was the main reason for the rebuild. The questions, the words used on screen and the branding are all set for each organisation, so a housing inspector and an airline observer can use the same software without either of them seeing the other's vocabulary.
Other sectors
We've built example versions for seven sectors, from social housing to pharmaceutical supplier audits, using fictional organisations and made-up data. None of them is in use yet, and each will be designed with a pilot partner first, because the questions worth asking in a contact centre or on a housing inspection are best decided by the people who do that work.
The people behind it
Harlow Stewart
Harlow Stewart brings the aviation safety expertise and runs observation and survey programmes for airlines on SOMAT. If you're an airline or another aviation organisation, Harlow Stewart is your first point of contact.
Elan Smart Solutions
Elan designs, builds and supports the platform, and runs the pilots in other sectors, so questions about the software, how it's hosted or how a pilot would work are best sent to us.
Data and access
Access is granted against your own organisation's structure, so permission given for a region covers the teams and sites within it and nothing outside it. Records a person isn't allowed to see are filtered out before they leave the database, so they never reach that person's screen.
Every change to a session, a survey or a permission is logged with its old and new values. Surveys are replaced by new versions instead of being edited, so a past result can always be traced back to the exact questions that were asked.
Hosting, data processing and security are better discussed with your information governance team directly than summarised here, and we'll do that before any pilot data is collected.
Technology
SOMAT is a web application built on Laravel 11 (a widely used PHP framework) with a React and TypeScript front end, so there's nothing to install beyond a current web browser.
Changes to how it behaves are made alongside automated tests, of which there are now over 1,200. Results can be exported to Excel at any time, so you can keep your own copy of everything that's been recorded.
Pilot partnerships
If you'd like to see SOMAT working with your own questions and data, a pilot runs for six months and we agree its scope with you before it starts.