Author: Edmundas
[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” row_border_radius=”none” row_border_radius_applies=”bg” overlay_strength=”0.3″ gradient_direction=”left_to_right” shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”all” column_element_spacing=”default” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” bg_image_animation=”none” border_type=”simple” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]Similarly, to most aviation sectors, the ground handling industry is quite conservative, and changes are sometimes slow to take root. While many organisations push for internal improvements in time savings, higher efficiency, and lower error count, changing the long-established methods is a difficult task.
“For quite a while now recruitment has been a challenge to most aviation organisations with demand for staff steadily growing and supply lagging behind, making well-trained employees a valuable asset,” explained Romas Butkevicius, CEO of Sensus Aero, a new-gen software solution for the aviation industry. “This puts additional importance on the whole training process as in-demand employees have many choices and opportunities in the industry. Thus, old and boring training methods can become detrimental to retaining much-needed staff.”
According to Konradas Dulka, Product Director, providing large amounts of text and hoping that newcomers will remember everything is no longer a viable option. “It has been noticed that micro training combined with interactive training has been much more effective, engaging, and interesting. This tendency becomes even more noticeable as generation Z will join the workforce, requiring more effort from organisations to keep them interested.”
This is one of many reasons, why Sensus Aero has advanced forward and embraced the newest technologies to make a substantial improvement on training processes. “There are tools used for Virtual Reality simulators in aviation, but to go even further, we found, that combining VR manual, VR examination and 3D manuals substantially improves training material appropriation, both in on-boarding process and on the field. This solution is not just a tool, but easily – and with low costs – incorporates into the training and onboarding process. We call it “Progressive 3D training flow” and it consists of 3 steps,” explained Dulka.
Sensus Aero Product Director shares that these 3 steps amplify the training quality and continue to serve while the employees are already in operations for refresh trainings.
“The first and second steps are done in Virtual Reality training. The 1st part shows how the procedure must be completed correctly in VR, where each student can see what the exact steps are. Here we are teaching students to focus on correct execution of the procedure and what to look out for.”
According to Dulka, the 2nd part of the training consists of a student going through examination process, where they are free to do whatever they want, however they must complete the objective and use the knowledge gained in the 1st part.
“As an example, with “workaround procedure” we are able to simulate realistic damage where students’ attention and knowledge is put to the test. Here, the emphasis falls on developing the right habits and making employees fully prepared for operations. In this instance, Virtual Reality serves as a perfect tool to learn the correct step-by-step procedure and follow their performance.
“Our last step is innovative 3D manual. We have developed the first-of-its-kind 3D manual, where we are able to transfer all the procedures in a visual 3D environment, which is accessible via mobile phones. This means, that if at any point employee forgets how the procedure must be done or how to operate a particular GSE, they can open the application and in one minute can go through visual instructions on how to execute the task. This serves as refresht training perfectly as well.”
Introducing innovative training amplification is a challenge for sure, but in the long run, such improvements in processes can become an irreplaceable part of operations. “Combining these 3 modern training steps can guarantee that training time will be reduced, lower supervision will be needed, and most importantly quality of training will be of the highest standard,” shared Konradas Dulka, Product Director of Sensus Aero.
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MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul) organisations are constantly faced with a plethora of different challenges one of which is finding clients. All in all, it’s a difficult task, usually taken on by talented salespeople who negotiate with clients and participate in tenders. While some parts of this process are easy to manage, others require a lot of time and effort. Preparing a quotation is one of them.
According to Romas Butkevicius, CEO of Sensus Aero, software solution for the aviation industry, efficiency is one of the key factors determining the success of the aviation business. “Getting back to a client with a proposal even an hour late can cost you a contract and, possibly, a loyal client. With businesses going digital, previously slow processes are getting rethought and improved, allowing early adopters to get ahead of the competition.”
Laimonas Antanaitis, Product Owner at Sensus Aero shares that preparing a proposal with an accurate quotation requires taking into consideration all client’s needs, required labour and skills time, necessary materials, hangar availability, and any other possible costs. “While it is manageable to do that by hand, it has potential for human error and that can become a deal breaker. Using digital solutions for such tasks minimizes possibilities for mistakes.”
Antanaitis maintains, that programs like Sensus MRO can become an advantage to MRO organizations as it helps companies to create accurate high-quality proposals promptly. “Our quotation processes are based on historical master data, aircraft maintenance planning documents (MPD’s), and statistics allowing for fast turnaround. According to our clients, the required time to create a quotation gets reduced significantly. A client once shared that since starting to use Sensus MRO, the quote preparation time has shrunk from 4 days for a proposal to only 2 hours. This allowed them to improve efficiency and gain more business.”
Using digital solutions help with many other quotation-related tasks that some don’t even think about. “By using programs, you can easily quote your customer in different ways, provide a quotation in several currencies, offer flexible billing options,” says Laimonas. “Using such solutions also allows sales’ teams to efficiently recalculate quotations.”
“In such a fast-paced industry, gaining a client or not can boil down to mere moments. Having a smart and convenient solution to respond to their queries in a timely manner can become a true game changer and elevate your business to the next level,” shares Laimonas Antanaitis.
Once the pandemic hit, experts claimed that the aviation industry will need years to come back to normal. And yet this summer season has already proven to disprove that claim. With passengers eager to return to travel and make up for a lost time, airports, airlines, and aviation support organisations are faced with employee shortages – there are simply not enough people to fly the planes, serve the passengers or unload their bags. Such shortage at airports around the world has resulted in frequent flight delays, cancellations, and lots of frustration for travellers.
With the limited number of available staff, companies turn to digital solutions to minimise the impact, maximise efficiency, and ensure stable operations. “As we observe drastic staffing shortages, the usability and efficiency of each person must be pushed to the max,” claims Romas Butkevicius, CEO of Sensus Aero, a new-gen software solution for the aviation industry. “One important thing to remember – if you are extremely understaffed, the software won’t find you any new employees. However, digital solutions can aid you in the management of the staff you do have. For example, one solution can find better ways to schedule needed staff thus saving on required personnel per period. Needing even 10 fewer people to cover the period while maintaining the same quality of service, can save massive costs on salary alone in the long run,” Romas shares and adds, “While aviation companies struggle to find needed staff, utilizing efficiently current staffing is a must.”
According to him, using scheduling tools can also save from human errors. “Before managing any real-time ground handling operations, one must have a good plan. That’s why planners are a valuable asset to the business and the schedule they design plays a vital part. Yet, they are human and make mistakes. Having reliable software can aid in avoiding many threats. And while such systems are not fully replacements for actual planners, they can be a real help in finding the best solutions.”
Sensus Aero CEO explains that the tool is able to generate rosters for both, perfect, meaning what is your needed demand with specific qualifications, and for unfulfilled plan situations when the system generates the roster with resources the company currently possess. “The latter mode is harder, as the system, not the planner, has to take in mind all unique situations and automatically assign tasks equally throughout the period. More to that, our solution utilizes AI, which kicks in after 2-3 months of planning and learns the patterns of planner manual changes,” he shares. “The AI is both simple and complex, however, the Rostering requires “human touch” and we found, that each planner has its own style – we are trying to apply it if it has a continuous logic behind it. This helps both us and the users to tune up the results and even further optimize the schedules.”
While specialized tools can help businesses adapt to difficult staffing situations, Romas believes that the real, long-term solution for staff shortage is more in the hand of the community as a whole. “We need to encourage the younger generation to join aviation more eagerly. And this is the massive task before us.”
IT system issues in aviation and its segments like ground handling have been a persisting headache for the industry. Even with the ongoing aviation digitization, many of the used systems are still too sluggish and too rigid to catch up to the growing need for up-to-date solutions. This staggers the overall growth, pilling up the returning problems for the whole industry.
Ground handling, which encompasses everything from check-in services to marshaling and aircraft interior and exterior cleaning, is heavily dependent on planning. Romas Butkevicius, CEO of Sensus Aero, a new-gen software solution for the aviation industry, explains that the day-to-day processes at an airport involve hundreds of people, aircraft, and equipment, and clunky IT systems struggle to keep up with the traffic of tasks.
“With so many tasks and people to keep a track of, the currently used systems are failing to do their job properly. At this point, they are outdated and can’t catch up with the technology and advancements that the aviation industry startups are creating. New solutions are needed, but even with all the innovation happening in the industry, there is still a lack of solutions in the market.”
According to Butkevicius, these problems are reoccurring, yet a number of ground handling service providers are still using the outdated systems. There are a few reasons for it. The current platforms for ground handling management are created by long-established companies carrying weight with them, but they are slow of introducing change that could handle the sheer strain of ongoing daily processes. Another one would be the fact that the systems are fragmented. There are dozens of different systems used for managing different tasks, and they are not interconnected. This means that a ground handling service provider could be using 20 or 30 different systems just to service all areas.
“At the moment, there is almost no choice in the market for a platform, a tool that would unify the systems,” observes Butkevicius. “A ground handling service provider would need to integrate a number of different platforms, put in hours to train staff to be able to use them, and keep track of all of them separately. That is why we felt the need to solve this key problem in the industry.”
According to Butkevicius, a one-in-all platform, could be the solution – something that Sensus Aero is offering. An all-encompassing solution could tackle the reoccurring issues ground handling service providers face. A resource planning optimisation platform, could, in fact, increase and streamline every aspect of the MRO, ground handling, and fuelling processes, at the same time driving efficiency and growth that otherwise would be stagnated.
The IT system issues in aviation continue to arise – and they almost always are the same ones. If ground handling solution providers want to bring back efficiency, keep up with the changing times and, most importantly, encourage growth, then they would need to start looking into solutions that could help solve it.
With the summer season in aviation well underway, the industry is experiencing repeated issues that have been major pain points for years. The latest British Airways hiccup – scrapping its entire short-haul schedule after hardware and software systems’ failure – is only the tip of the iceberg. The IT issues go deeper than just airlines and are affecting maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), ground handling, and fuelling segments, to name a few. However, adopting innovative solutions could help curb these reoccurring problems.
The last two years of the pandemic have highlighted how truly outdated IT systems in aviation can be. Romas Butkevicius, CEO of Sensus Aero, a next-gen software solution for the aviation industry, observes that most MRO, ground handling, and fuelling service providers still run on old systems that do not reflect the times.
“It has to be said – most systems that are used across the industry, especially concerning MRO, ground handling, and fuelling services, are stagnant and fragmented. For example, a ground handling service provider on average can use around 20-30 different systems. What it means is that each system is separate from one another – and this invites a heap of problems.”
With the wave of digitization sweeping over the aviation industry, the stagnation and fragmentation of key IT systems remain unaddressed. Butkevicius notes that, surprisingly, there weren’t any solutions offered that would seek to unify the various systems until Sensus Aero stepped into the market.
Sensus Aero is the first to offer an innovative, all-in-one solution that seeks to tackle these pain points in aviation. The integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) optimisation platform is designed to increase and streamline every aspect of MRO, ground handling, and fuelling processes. As an integrated one-system platform, Sensus Aero stands out in automation, user experience, and process design, and is fully client-focused. The platform can also be tailored to match a customer’s specific needs, making it flexible and adaptable to client briefs. Backed by years of know-how and experience in IT and aviation, Sensus Aero is a future key player in the aviation tech space.
“The aviation industry is going through a strong digital transformation phase at the moment and these innovations are changing the aviation industry. New solutions, delivering such benefits Sensus Aero bring to the table, are driving the digitization of processes and solving issues that have become even more frequent in recent times. I believe that this push will become a part of a bigger movement in the market, addressing the lethargic and fragmented IT solutions of old.”
Recent years have seen multiple examples of failing IT systems, and while airlines and airports are usually at the tip of the spear, the issues of outdated systems run deeper than that, affecting other layers of the aviation industry. To solve these problems, innovative, modern solutions are needed, and MRO, ground handling, and fuelling service providers should welcome the change to move forward with the times.