President and CEO of eTT Aviation, Tom LaJoie, founded his company 18 years ago with the intention of solving a problem in the aviation industry: a lack of trip and shift trading platforms for crew members. This original product was named Crew Companion and is still used by thousands of United Airlines crew members. Over the years, eTT Aviation has continued to provide innovative technological solutions to a myriad of challenges facing the aviation industry. Our newest product, the SkedFlex Air Operations Suite, incorporates the flight and crew tracking capabilities of SkedFlex with the accounting, maintenance, inventory management, purchasing, human resources, and payroll management capabilities of the Management Information System for Aviation (MISA).
While the list that follows is not exhaustive, these are eTT’s picks for the top 4 challenges to managing airline operations and how the Air Operations Suite can help airlines better solve them.
1) Outdated, or inefficient operations software
A major issue facing aviation companies is that their operations management platforms have not evolved to meet the changing and growing needs of the industry and few existing operations management programs are equipped with all the functions needed to manage an airline. An outdated or inefficient operations management system can compromise the operational efficiency of an entire airline. Furthermore, there is an obvious advantage to using one platform to manage all a business’ needs- it saves money on pricey subscriptions and saves valuable time by centralizing a company’s operational functions. A modernized operations management system capable of incorporating innovation and customer customizations is also increasingly important for aviation companies to adjust to growing customer demand and changes within the industry.
eTT Aviation’s Air Operations Suite is the airline industry’s best solution for revitalizing an obsolete operations management system. Our innovative and intuitive operations software is complete with all the tools an airline needs to effectively and efficiently run all administrative aspects of their operation, including flight and crew tracking, automated shift and trip trading, accounting, maintenance, inventory management, purchasing, human resources, and payroll. eTT Aviation is constantly innovating and modernizing our products to provide aviation companies with the most up-to-date and user-friendly technology to revolutionize how airlines manage their operations.
2) Managing complex flight time laws and restrictions
Managing flight and rest time regulations and laws are one of the more complex operations that an aviation operations management system must be able to execute. With variations in federal, union, and company rule sets, a robust and automated system is needed to ensure that all aviation laws are being followed.
The SkedFlex Flight & Crew Management System provides a solution to this challenge. Its comprehensive set of tools provide airlines and air operators the ability to schedule and manage crewmembers, flights, and aircraft in a flexible, efficient, and visual manner while automatically verifying the legality of such actions. With its proprietary rules engines, SkedFlex helps ensure regulatory compliance under the Code of Federal Regulations parts 117, 121, 125, and 135, for flight, duty, and rest limitations. Additional company requirements and international aviation rule sets can also be incorporated, giving aviation companies increased customizability and control over the system.
3) Managing large crews
Managing a large workforce in any industry poses significant administrative challenges. In the airline industry, these challenges particularly arise with managing crew and flight schedules, scheduling conflicts, and training or qualifications. However, with the right information infrastructure, much of this administrative busywork can be automated to save administrators’ valuable time!
The SkedFlex Air Operations Suite contains a trip and shift-trading database where crew members can manage their own schedules through line bidding and preferential bidding systems. Companies can customize under what criteria a trip trade can be approved automatically, cutting down the number of time administrators spend on scheduling conflicts. Our automatization functions thus increase productivity by reducing workload and process errors. Thanks to SkedFlex, some of our clients even have as much as 80% of their monthly trades going through automatically.
SkedFlex also offers a powerful and easy-to-use module that automates, tracks, and manages qualifications and training. Administrators can access their entire organization’s qualification statuses, assess the urgency of upcoming renewals, schedule one-time and recurring training more efficiently, and upload sign-off documentation. The module ensures crewmembers are current and qualified in accordance with regulatory requirements and is customizable to include company-specific regulations. You’ll never again worry about keeping records accurate or up to date because SkedFlex will do it automatically!
4) Using data as intelligence
Operating an airline efficiently and profitably requires sifting through vast stockpiles of data — flight logs, maintenance records, delay reports, and so on. Unfortunately, throughout much of aviation’s history, data analysis and business intelligence (BI) was limited to extracting data from nothing more than scores of spreadsheets – a manual, workload intensive process that struggled to produce illuminating information.
The SkedFlex Business Intelligence module exponentially improves situational awareness and evaluation by joining multiple SkedFlex data sources and processing them for display and analysis using intuitive real-time dashboards. The SkedFlex BI module is robust, scalable, and adaptable: any number of complex reports may be handled with unparalleled speed and minimal system impact. A core feature of the module is the ability to view analytical results in myriad ways. Graphical and tabular data, sorting, highlighting, and exporting are all possible. Virtually unlimited ways to slice and dice data to make sound resource allocation decisions and improve operating efficiency. Along with these features and dozens of other widgets and plugins, SkedFlex has the tools to ameliorate aviation companies’ capacity for using data as intelligence.
Contact us to schedule a demo or for more information on how eTT Aviation can help your aviation company solve its administrative challenges.
Sources and related texts:
https://www.openjawtech.com/7-challenges-airlines-18/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221147480_Software_Challenges_In_Aviation_Systems
https://www.ibsplc.com/blog/airline-operations/legacy-systems-why-do-we-still-tolerate-them-in-airline-ops
Author:
Hailey LaJoie
eTT Aviation
Special Projects Manager