Category: News

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.