Deolan - Digital Aviation

How to plug the biggest productivity drains in ground handling

2018-07-12T22:00:00+00:00

Operating under intense time pressure, they coordinate a whole host of activities, from managing baggage and catering, to load planning, dealing with disruption and sending operational updates. Partnering with numerous airlines and teams simultaneously means constantly juggling competing demands with limited resources, while working within strict parameters and performance targets.

But despite their hard work and the value they bring, ground handlers are struggling with diminishing profits, driven by rising fuel prices, stiff competition and a pressure on costs. Plus, with short-term contracts becoming the norm, planning and investing for the future are frequently seen as risks not worth taking.

While many of these issues may be out of their control, one area where ground handling teams do have the power to differentiate themselves is in their own systems and processes, many of which haven’t changed for 20 years or more, including:

Outdated tech: It isn’t unusual for ground handling teams to rely on outdated legacy systems, such as email, Word, walkie-talkie and even Telex, when collaborating with their teams and stakeholders. But these tools are actually making life more difficult, causing delays, mistakes, repetition and inconsistencies in communication, ultimately impacting performance and the passenger experience.
Reporting headaches: Ground handling professionals are bogged down with reporting demands, including end of shift handovers that can take two hours or more to produce. Think of the time that could be saved if reports were generated automatically and instantly shared with the relevant people?
Lost in the ether: The popularity of legacy tools means flight and passenger details are exchanged and stored within a multitude of emails and Word documents - or simply lost in the ether – so finding information at a later date is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Overcomplicated complaints: Having no central log of information also impacts complaints handling, leaving customer service teams scrabbling around for the details they need to resolve passenger issues. Investigating complaints often involves numerous calls to the relevant individuals to discover what happened during a particular event, sucking valuable time from teams across the whole ecosystem.
Meeting madness: Known the world over as a huge productivity drain, nonetheless meetings do have their place – when managed effectively. But factor in time creating agendas, then writing up reports and before you know it, you’ve lost hours that could be much better spent.
Never-ending email trails: Email is great in some situations, but when you’re sending important updates to numerous respondents, then tracking or collating responses, it can quickly get out of control. Surely there has to be a way of avoiding email trail hell?

Many of these practices may well be ingrained in ground handling operations, but if not addressed now, they will continue to impact performance and profits, while also limiting the ability to offer joined up services across the whole air transport ecosystem.

Yet, with just a little bit of investment, overhauling these productivity pain points will help ground handlers to reduce costs, squeeze more out of their resources and boost that all-important bottom-line.

Deolan’s Logbook is designed to combat many of the biggest productivity drains in air transport by providing a single platform where teams can log, share and access flight and passenger details, via an intuitive social media style dashboard. With everything stored in one place, reporting and meetings become fast and efficient, handling complaints is a breeze, plus you can rest assured that the days of trawling through emails are well and truly over.

Data and Collaboration: the key to airline complaints handling

2018-06-12T22:00:00+00:00

But airlines can achieve a huge competitive advantage by anticipating and then dealing with passenger claims quickly and transparently, saving themselves and their customers a lot of time and frustration.

Airlines are also under huge pressure from regulators when it comes to managing flight disruption and complaints. European Passenger Rights Regulations were introduced to protect customers that have faced delayed or cancelled flights, as well as those who have been downgraded or prevented from boarding. As a result, airlines must now hold passenger and flight data for five years, the period during which passengers are able to claim for compensation.

But despite these regulations and the business case for effective complaints handling, many airlines still fall short when it comes to addressing problems raised by customers, with research showing that less than a third (29%) of passengers are satisfied with how airlines responded to their issue. The same research highlighted that one of the biggest claims made by passengers was the lack of information received during travel disruption – something that, if done effectively, could help to nip complaints in the bud before they escalate further.

High profile cases of poor complaints handling also frequently hit the headlines, with airlines often accused of a lack of transparency. One such example involved Ryanair last year, which was accused of failing to make it clear that passengers had a right to claim compensation. Cases like this have a huge impact on customer satisfaction and retention, hitting profits and requiring even greater investment in customer acquisition to recover. The reputation of the entire airline industry takes a hit as a result.

So how can airlines reverse this trend?

While there are a whole variety of factors involved in the managing complaints effectively, in many cases airlines face an uphill struggle due to the complex supply chain and old-fashioned legacy systems that still exist within the sector. Turning around thousands of flights every day, each one involving numerous ground handling partners, makes tracking and recording potential issues fraught with difficulties. This then has a knock-on effect for customer service representatives required to locate details quickly when handling complaints and communicating with passengers, whether over the phone or via digital channels.

These issues might be ingrained, but the solution doesn’t have to be complicated. Deolan’s Logbook gives airlines and their ground partners a plug and play, one-stop-shop to digitisation, and a central location for storing details about every single flight. A social media style tool, it’s intuitive to use and streamlines complaint handling in a number of ways:

By giving airlines an integrated view of all their flight operations in one place, saving time trawling through a variety of systems and liaising with numerous different teams to find answers.
By providing quick and easy search functionality through intuitive tags, so flight and customer details can be recalled quickly when speaking to customers and handling complaints.
By creating a central database of all flight and customer data which can be fed into real-time communications with customers about flight disruption, ensuring they’re kept informed and minimising the chance of more serious complaints and compensation claims

Today’s digitally-savvy customers live in a world of instant answers, where their needs and convenience are placed at the forefront. Yet when they arrive at the airport, these same customers are too often faced with the complete opposite, with a lack of information, poor communication and inefficient complaints procedures if something does go wrong.

Managing disruption and handling complaints are inescapable parts of the passenger journey; they’re not going to go away anytime soon. But with the right data and collaboration facilitated by specialist technology, these processes can be used to enhance the customer experience, rather than making it worse.

Why air transport demands a unique approach to digitisation

2018-05-03T22:00:00+00:00

The drive for digitisation is by no means unique to air transport; plenty of other industries are grappling with the same issues. But it’s hard to think of any other sector that faces quite as many obstacles, due to complexity and unique ways of working. So, where other organisations can invest in generic business tools, such as Slack, Facebook Pro or Salesforce, air transport demands a more tailored approach, with tools built around it’s specific characteristics and needs.

Here are just a few of the biggest challenges air transport faces on the road to digitisation:

Long value chain and complex, fragmented ecosystem: With up to 15 stakeholders involved in serving passengers and processing flights, change needs to happen at an ecosystem level, with all stakeholders aligned and synchronised on a unique tool. For this to happen, the industry needs a solution that meets the specific needs of each party, and is intuitive to use.
Short-term contracts between partners and suppliers: Contracts between airlines and ground handlers can be as short as a couple of years, reducing the appetite to invest in digital transformation and alignment between partners. Ground handlers will only feel confident making this investment, if they know the tools they implement will continue to be useful in the long-term, while simultaneously increasing the value they can offer - and the profits they can earn.
Data silos: Air transport’s long and fragmented value chain means that data is spread among multiple organisations in a whole variety of formats. Collating this data into a single location is almost impossible, not to mention managing access confidentiality, privacy and GDPR compliance. The ecosystem can only overcome this issue by changing the way it collects and shares data at the source.
Making data actionable: Airlines, airports and ground handlers generate mountains of passenger and flight data every day. Collecting the data is one issue, but doing so in a way that makes it actionable for each level of the business requires sector-specific insight and filters. Data must be adapted to the specific format of each IT system, as well as being delivered at the right time and sorted in the right way to be useful.
Diverse business rules: Air transport also has a whole set of unique business rules, which must be incorporated into digital systems and processes. Establishing and maintaining these business rules requires both a perfect knowledge of detailed operations, as well as the capability to design the IT to reflect these.
The ecosystem is constantly evolving: Contracts come and go in air transport, with new stakeholders, IT systems and processes coming into play all the time.Maintaining data consistency, while factoring in business rules at such a large scale, is an ongoing battle.
Getting the UX right: With such a wide range of users, building a UX that enables everyone to interact with and handle the data isn’t easy. If your system is complex to use, requires lengthy and detailed training and brings poor value to the user, adoption will be low and the system useless.

Digital platforms such as Slack, Facebook Pro, Salesforces or Atlassian have amazing capabilities and are already in use at scale in many business areas. I don’t know any developers or any independent contractors who still use mail to work in teams, due to the speed and collaboration capabilities these platforms offer. But they are not made to handle such a complex network of stakeholders, nor the volume and variety of data that exists in air transport. A Slack thread centralising flight data would likely run about 2km long!

You could argue that another possible solution would be an integration platform, such as mindtree, informatica or Tibco, however these platforms are limited in handling industry-specific business models, particularly as the air transport ecosystem evolves over time.

The only effective solution is to turn to an industry specialist, with technology designed for the specific needs of the air transport sector. Deolan’s Logbook has been built for exactly this purpose, designed with input from ground handlers, airlines and airports to perfectly suit their needs.

On the one hand, Logbook provides a central location for communication and collaboration between partners and colleagues, and on the other, it collects, stores and organises this information, establishing a data hub for the entire ecosystem.

And with the data you need at your fingertips, you have the foundation for any number of innovations, to drive efficiency, customer experience and growth, right across the air transport ecosystem.

Fighting the profit squeeze on ground handlers - and making flying fun again

2018-04-15T22:00:00+00:00

But this is a false economy. With brand loyalty almost non-existent in the air transport industry, ground operations are fundamental to delivering customer experiences that drive increased passenger retention, lower costs and higher margins for airlines. And now, with advances in technology, ground ops providers have an opportunity to make themselves indispensable to their airline clients, by sharing, collecting and leveraging the reams of data flowing backwards and forwards every day.

The customer acquisition challenge

Airlines are stuck between a rock and a hard place, as they see their own margins squeezed by the customer acquisition process. The rise of flight aggregators such as Skyscanner, Booking.com and increasingly Google, has led to a price and schedule driven market, with more than a third (37%) of passengers purchasing based on cost and 17% based on the flight schedule (Statista). Google has data, scale and convenience on its side, making the airline brand irrelevant in too many cases and, as usual, the search engine always comes out on top.

Driving passenger loyalty

Unable to compete with Google on reach and certainly not on acquisition data, airlines therefore need other ways to differentiate themselves, to drive a unique passenger experience, increase value-added services and improve brand loyalty. The flight is currently the only area where airlines have direct control over the passenger experience, leaving a huge gap in the customer journey – the airport.

Passengers spend minimum of two hours travelling to the airport, queuing for check-in and security, then waiting in departures, with numerous opportunities for customer interaction, regarding flight changes and delays, queue times or customer preferences. But, with no visibility of this part of the customer journey, the airline has no way of personalising or customising these interactions.

The result is a travel experience that is frequently disappointing, with IATA figures showing that only 52% of passengers were satisfied with their last journey, further exacerbating the loyalty problem.

Step forward, ground handlers

Plugging this gap in passenger visibility all comes down to data and this is where the ground handling companies have the ace card. Ground handlers are the information hub for the passenger at the airport, with access to passenger and flight data, baggage information and catering details. The problem is that currently this information is only shared via legacy technology such as email, Telex and walkie-talkie, which means it’s quickly lost or misplaced. If the individuals involved were able to share and, crucially, collect and store this information more effectively, it’s value for the passenger experience and driving loyalty for airlines would be considerable.

Airlines would finally have the information they need to drive meaningful passenger interactions at the airport, while ground handlers would have a vital lever in their relationship with the airlines, providing an additional revenue stream and way of reversing the persistent decline in profits. Ground handlers could effectively become the data provider to their airline partners, digitising the entire customer journey and increasing operational performance across the board.

It may sound like a big leap for ground operations companies, but it doesn’t have to be, thanks to the technology now available. Deolan’s Logbook has been built for exactly this purpose, providing a social media style collaboration platform, that enables ground handling providers to log flight and passenger details in real-time, to be shared with their teams and various stakeholders, including airlines. The technology can be up and running in a matter of hours, is intuitive to use and cost-effective to run.

It’s time for ground handlers to fight the perennial profit squeeze – and for flying to become fun again.

10 ways Logbook will lighten your workload through seamless collaboration

2018-04-15T22:00:00+00:00

All teams get into a routine in how they communicate, share information and keep things moving day-to-day. And when you’re stuck in a collaboration rut, it can feel like the easiest and best way of working – even when it’s not. Plus, changing your established routine can seem like a lot of hard work.

But it doesn’t have to be. Logbook is a social media style collaboration tool designed specifically for ground operations, airports and airline teams, providing a central location where you can communicate, share information, filter and retrieve data.

Just like other social platforms that we’ve been accustomed to in our daily lives, Logbook is intuitive to use and requires little or no training. And if you’re anything like our existing users, you’ll be surprised by the value it can add to almost all your day-to-day tasks.

So, whether you’re already using Logbook, or thinking about introducing it in your team, here are 10 tips and tricks on how it can transform the way you work…

Replace your overflowing inbox: It may have served you well, but email is quickly becoming an antiquated tool. You would be amazed to see how much time you’ll save by transferring all your team’s communications to Logbook. Share events and attachments on the central dashboard and receive regular updates and comments from your colleagues. Everybody has visibility of what is happening in real- time, with no more trawling through unwieldy inboxes and Word documents.
Collaborate with all your teams and partners: Logbook makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues and partners across the whole air transport ecosystem, not just within your team. Doing so will greatly cut the time it takes to share important records and events and you’ll have access to all the information you need - instantly. Inviting your colleagues to Logbook is easy too, just click ‘invite people’ at the bottom right of your contact list.
End-of-shift reports in seconds: End-of-shift reporting can be time- consuming and frustrating - sapping your energy and productivity, leaving you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. With Logbook, you can shrink your handovers from a couple of hours to just minutes, by printing reports directly from the platform. Simply choose your required time period and the format you’d like, filter based on tags, and your report is ready to go.
Instant answers: Handle complaints more quickly and effectively with Logbook’s tagging and search functionality. With pre-defined tags applied to events as they’re posted, you and your colleagues can recover specific information and have the answers you need in a matter of seconds.
Powerful analytics: By capturing all your operations data in detail, Logbook gives you a single view of your operations, along with valuable performance analytics. By accessing and reviewing this insight regularly, you and your team can see where efficiencies can be made, driving continuous improvement.
Streamlined meetings: Rather than compiling Word reports before and following meetings, why not use Logbook reports as the basis for your discussion. With key events input into Logbook in real-time, the information you need is already in the system, saving you hours spent building agendas and meeting reports.
Work on the go: Ground ops professionals aren’t always located behind a desk at a computer, which can make logging events and running end-of-shift reports even more of a challenge. Logbook overcomes this problem with easy access from your mobile, so you can update and view flight information, even when you’re on the move.
Get acknowledgements: If you need to track who has read and acknowledged a particular instruction or airline procedure, you can do this using Logbook’s instructions feature. Just choose the flight you’re referencing, who you want to inform, include relevant attachments and send. You can then track recipients via the dedicated dashboard.
Export, share and send records: For those moments when you want to send a specific record or report to a colleague, whether internal or external, you can export, view and send the details in a whole range of formats, including mail and SMS.
Real-time updates to the passenger: Last but not least, by updating Logbook in real-time, you’re automatically making life easier for your customer service and marketing colleagues, who can relay important details to passengers and the media, particularly in times of disruption. That means a more proactive response, fewer and shorter phone calls and fewer customer complaints. So, happy faces all round.

We hope this has been a useful crash course in all the different ways you can use Logbook to collaborate better, both within your team and more

No excuses for radio silence during flight disruption

2018-03-13T22:00:00+00:00

News reels and column inches are filled with tired and disappointed passengers, driven to despair by customer service staff who can’t tell them what’s going on, or faced with contradictory information coming from airlines, airports and ground handlers. The reputational impact for the airline industry is huge, yet nothing ever seems to change.

Of course, the fault doesn’t lie with the customer service staff at any touchpoint, who do the best they can under very difficult circumstances. Nor does it lie with the operational teams, which are doing their utmost to keep the show on the road. Instead, the problem comes down to how information is captured, recorded and shared between teams at the airline, airport and the ground handlers, as well as more widely throughout the airport ecosystem, including restaurant, hotels and transfers. That comes down to existing legacy systems and communication technologies, that are unable to transfer the information needed for teams to manage disruptions and interact with the customer in real-time. Current ways of working are simply not fit to deliver the kind of experience that today’s customers expect.

The nature of air transport means that numerous teams are involved in the customer experience, across airlines, airports and ground operations. Within airlines, the operations department – or operational control centre - is responsible for directing activity in real-time, from managing catering suppliers, to ensuring planes are turned around on time, and making necessary announcements to waiting passengers. Then on the other side of the equation, there are the customer care teams, usually a call centre and claims service, who deal with real-time customer enquiries, along with historical compensation claims, related to disruption, cancellations and other irregularities. Then you also have the wider ecosystem to consider, such as hotels, restaurants, transfers, airport authorities, and more.

Yet, despite their vital role in delivering a smooth passenger experience, both during and in the days, weeks or months following travel, customer care teams have a very low visibility on flight and passenger data, including flight traffic management systems, departure control services, flight scheduling, Type B messaging, ACARs data, and any reports coming from the teams and subcontractors. This gap is exacerbated during high traffic periods when reporting on passenger disruptions is often sporadic, incomplete, or takes place via email, telephone or walkie-talkie, making it almost impossible for the details to be shared more widely or recorded effectively for reference later.

This fundamental breakdown in communication, caused by a spaghetti of inefficient systems, is causing wholly avoidable frustration for passengers and giving airlines, and the industry as a whole, a bad name. Not only that, but it also costs money in customer complaints management and compensation when a simple irregularity turns to a long and complex investigation, due to miscommunication - further impacting customer loyalty.

What is needed is a central collaborative platform, where all those involved in the passenger experience have visibility of real-time events as they happen, enabling them to respond appropriately and provide the most up-to-date information to those waiting to start their journeys.

Here at Deolan, we’re on a mission to fill this communication gap, with our new collaboration platform, Logbook. Incorporating intuitive features inspired by social media, operational teams simply log events on the shared wall as they happen, to be accessed instantly by their colleagues in the customer service team. So, when passengers get in touch or approach staff asking for information, either in real-time or at a later date, the details are all there on the system, easily searchable by tag. The result is instant answers, no more frustration and an improved, seamless passenger experience all round.

Find out more about Logbook.

Collaboration is at the heart of passenger experience

2018-03-05T22:00:00+00:00

In terms of overall satisfaction, Europe is by no means the worst of the global territories surveyed (Africa scores just 40%), but with only 52% of passengers satisfied with their last travel experience, there is definitely room for improvement. So, what is letting us down? The top three frustrations are not wholly unexpected, focused around the moments when customers typically experience delays and a lack of information: 1) bag collection 2) self-service bag drop and 3) border control and immigration.

In response to these kinds of frustrations, IATA claims the air transport industry “needs to be more agile and be open to re-think the current state”, grouping the key levers for improvement around 4 themes:

Digitalisation
Passenger in control
Value of time
In-flight experience
Well-informed passenger

The last point resonates particularly strongly with our team here at Deolan and the IATA report expands on what this means for passengers:

Two thirds of passengers (63%) say real-time information would improve the travel disruption experience, making it by far the top choice
Customers now expect flight notifications via a range of channels including SMS (42%), Email (26%) and smartphone apps (28%)

The need for real-time passenger communication may seem obvious and simple but making it a reality isn’t easy, due to information that is fragmented siloed, hidden, duplicated, modified and corrupted across thousands of IT systems in different organisations. In other words, recording, retrieving and distributing information about future flights is a problem - doing it in real-time even more so.

A perfect example of the problems this causes is in the management of flight schedules. As anyone in air transport will know, the flight schedule forms the basis for how ground assistants plan their resources, their equipment and their work. But unfortunately, it’s very volatile information, changing constantly and requiring never-ending updates with regards to following details:

Flight number
Departure and/or arrival time
Type or size of aircraft
Routing, i.e. Arrival or departure city
Connection city
Number of stops
Flight cancellation

Aside from a minority of airlines who provide regular updates directly to their ground partners, for the vast majority, the information is delivered sporadically and in an unstructured way, often containing partial information about a specific change. This means that various versions of the flight schedule end up being assembled within the different teams who require it, using a variety of different sources. It is time-consuming, inefficient and greatly increases the chance of human error.

Bridging the gap between operations and the passenger experience, as suggested by IATA, will therefore not happen if there is not a radical change in the way information is recorded, updated and communicated to the right stakeholders. The name of this change is “centralisation”, but not in the way of a large, central database. This centralisation will happen in the form of a smart “collaborative platform”, which has strong capabilities including:

Providing a central location where different stakeholders can record flight information to be accessed and viewed in real-time by their colleagues and partners
A central database of flight information to enable real-time passenger updates and highlight areas for service improvement
A system which is flexible and can be tailored to different use cases and the needs of different teams
Quick and easy to set up, intuitive and enjoyable to use

What do we make of all of this then? Put simply, digitisation in the air transport industry has been an extremely slow and somewhat agonising process due to the prevalence of legacy tools, including Word, Telex and email.

This is exactly why, at Deolan, we are constantly innovating our technology to bring the power of digital collaboration to grounds operations, airports and airlines teams, with a tool that is as easy and intuitive to use as social media platforms. And most importantly, it provides the foundations needed to deliver the kind of travel experience that passengers have long been demanding.

Find out more about Logbook.

Why a bottom-up approach is the only way to digitize air transport

2018-02-18T22:00:00+00:00

Huge technological developments accompanied by rising customer expectations have sparked a scramble to incorporate digital solutions into years-old, deeply entrenched systems and processes. Air transport is relatively late in terms of digital adoption and everyone is agreed on the need to make this happen. But, in an industry where little has changed for 10, 20 or even 30 years in some cases, few are sure of how to go about it.

I read a lot about digitization in air transport, and the reports that hit the headlines are usually futuristic stories about robots walking through airport terminals, or chatbots helping passengers to locate lost bags. It all sounds very innovative, but these initiatives are years ahead of what is really needed now, in terms of a long-term strategy and the foundations that hold it all together.

In reality, the industry is a long way from joining up the journey of the connected traveler and delivering a seamless passenger experience. With so many grounds teams involved in handling a single flight, data is still held in silos across various locations, often lost in emails, Telex, walkie-talkie and other unstructured communications. With no joined-up management of data, it’s impossible to provide a rich, contextualised and personalized customer experience.

The fundamental question is therefore: how do you bring all that data into one place, in an intelligent way, so that every system and agent that interacts with the passenger can access it? And how can we connect that data so that the whole ecosystem can work more efficiently and deliver the kinds of services and experiences that customers are demanding now - and those they’ll be demanding for in five years’ time?

Faced with this challenge, many companies are tempted to turn to the traditional remedies, involving expensive consultants and big IT projects, taking a top-down, waterfall approach. You can find plenty of impressive reports out there from consultants, analysing and reflecting on the digitization problem, but none of them offer a solution – unless you pay them thousands of pounds that is! And when you do, the solution is likely to be an all-singing- all-dancing IT system, that faces so many complications and delays that the original purpose gets lost and nobody wants, or knows how, to use it.

Companies that provide these solutions are usually selling to the CSO or CXO, but this person isn’t involved in day-to- day operations. You’re giving them a mission that they are totally unable to fulfill. I truly believe that as a senior manager, you can’t explain to an agent how to do their job better, as you aren’t doing it day-to- day - the contrary should be true. Senior managers can’t think at a use-case level, which means they end up implementing solutions that aren’t really useful – and therefore ultimately end in failure. We see it all the time with corporate intranet and internal social network projects - users usually hate using them.

The only way to overcome these stumbling blocks is for users to decide on the solution and lead the adoption, with access to tools that:

Solve a specific use case and perform one task very well, with a perfect fit with the user’s expectations
Are plug and play, quick to test and with little or no training required
Have a smooth and intuitive user experience to ensure adoption and user engagement
Are supported by an agile development cycle, where the evolving needs of users are rapidly incorporated on an ongoing basis

Under this model, adoption starts at the user level, where usability and value are validated in a cost-efficient way. Once the user is convinced, he’ll convince his colleagues and eventually his boss, driving wider adoption throughout the organisation. We can all name numerous tools like this in today’s workplace – Slack, Trello and Dropbox are all tools designed for bottom-up adoption. Users start with a free subscription, discover how useful a tool is, then persuade their boss to pay for a premium or business license. The cost is a fraction of that paid for consultants and big IT systems, plus the risk is lower and the chance of success significantly higher.

Air transport is in desperate need of a simple solution to the digitisation problem, but in too many cases it is made much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s time to forget waterfalls, expensive consultants, big IT and complexity. It’s time to give the power to the people - and your startup incubator 😉

Deolan launches collaboration platform for the air transport ecosystem

2018-02-07T22:00:00+00:00

Deolan, the air transport technology specialist, has launched a new collaboration platform, Logbook, allowing ground operations teams to log, share and access business critical information, in one secure location. The plug and play tool has been designed to replace the numerous legacy systems still used in air transport, including Telex, Microsoft Word and standard email systems, with the ultimate aim of improving the overall passenger experience, by enhancing connectivity, productivity and efficiency across ground operations.

Logbook is aimed at the complex and siloed supply chain that exists in air transport, where between 10 and 20 different companies are involved in handling a single flight. This makes recording, tracking and sharing information extremely challenging, with teams often overwhelmed by the volume of messages and information they receive, and with no central repository of data for identifying issues and areas for improvement.

The platform overcomes these issues by providing a centralised location where teams can input details of their shifts, while making it easy to collaborate with their colleagues and stakeholders. The information collated in Logbook also feeds into a central database for use by airlines and other stakeholders to drive efficiency and continuous improvement.

Logbook was designed with the close input of airport ground operations teams to ensure it fits with how they work and is easy to use. It incorporates modern timeline and tagging features, similar to those used in social networks, to maximise usability, user engagement and ease the process of searching and locating historic information. The tagging system allows for structured archiving of data and almost instant recovery of specific details of past events, which is frequently required when dealing with flight delays, investigating issues, and handling customer complaints.

Didier Riche, Managing Director, Biarritz Airport, commented: “Logbook allows us to achieve our objectives, to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and to enhance the quality of our service. The ability to respond in real-time and interactively, thanks to Logbook, allows us to anticipate complex situations and handle them better than before we had the platform.”

“The air transport industry suffers from massive inefficiencies due to the complexity of the ecosystem involved, and the prevalence of out-of-date legacy systems,” commented Yves Tuet, Founder and CEO of Deolan. “Deolan is on a mission to transform the way that operations teams handle information and collaborate on a day-to-day basis, giving them modern, intuitive tools that streamline how they input and share data. Logbook was born from numerous conversations with our clients, where they expressed frustration at the dearth of innovative technology in this space. By working closely with the teams operating on the frontline every day, we were able to incorporate the features and functionality that will make a real difference to how they operate. The result is the first system of its kind in the air transport industry.”

Logbook launches acknowledge feature to take the pain out of instructions

2018-02-07T22:00:00+00:00

For years, grounds operations managers have struggled with the task of circulating instructions and airline procedures amongst their teams, due to reliance on email and hard copy distribution. Vital updates frequently get lost in overflowing inboxes, while recording and tracking acknowledgments is time-consuming and inefficient. The productivity and performance of the whole ground operation suffers as a result.

Now, Deolan has developed a solution, with the launch of a new module for Logbook that streamlines the distribution of instructions amongst ground operations teams. The module, known as Instructions, enables users to circulate important updates and airline procedures via the platform, to be acknowledged by recipients using a dedicated button.

The sender can track and audit acknowledgements centrally via Logbook, ensuring key information has been seen and digested by the right people. All current and past instructions are then stored centrally on the platform, where managers can quickly see their status, and access archived logs to deal with any complaints or disputes. Having a central record of all past instructions is also invaluable for compliance and audit purposes, such as completing annual airline audits.

The functionality works equally well for day-to-day instructions and the more formal procedures documents that are regularly sent out by airlines. Covering issues such as safety alerts, equipment health-check, baggage requirements, service level agreements and turnaround times, failure to manage these effectively can impact customer safety, the passenger experience, and potentially leave ground operations teams in breach of contract. Logbook Instructions will reduce this burden significantly, driving improved productivity, performance and quality of service.

Instructions is now live on Logbook and updates can be sent to both existing Logbook users and those not yet on the platform. Deolan will also be making a number of enhancements to Instructions in the coming months, including the ability to file and view electronic copies of documents, categorise logs with tags, include links to flights and search past records.