Gama Aviation plc’s software division and wholly owned subsidiary, myairops, is launching an ecosystem of products aimed at helping airfields, regional airports, Fixed-Base Operators (FBOs), aircraft operators and their crews, to use data more efficiently, effectively and securely.
The first products were launched at EBACE in Geneva, Switzerland, at the end of May and include products for airports and airfields, and crew.
Operational excellence
The myairops FBO is a comprehensive solution for the management of airfield, airport, FBO or ground handling operations, delivered as a fully hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) solution which the company says enables businesses to integrate it without the need for costly or complex on-premise installation or upfront investment.
The myairops FBO solution aims to simplify the process of running an airport or airfield, offering elements such as an integrated and browser-based FIDS board capability which can offer visibility of aircraft movements departing and arriving at the facility.
Other elements offered include a scheduling board to map out the timeline of aircraft on the ground, a task-tracking workflow, and a configurable rules engine for charging, as well as automated billing.
The product enables customers to use an automated billing engine to calculate charges and ensure revenue is not lost. The company says the comprehensive and extendable billing engine enables custom charging rules, such as discounts for local aircraft, special promotions or price changes.
The solution allows businesses to input price catalogues into the system to configure pricing rules and auto-calculate charges as well as auto-invoice.
Tim Ford, MD of myairops, told Regional Gateway:
I think first and foremost it’s about protecting revenue, making sure you’re charging and getting what you’re owed for the services you’re delivering and it’s about generating business efficiency in terms of maybe walking away from paper-based systems and whiteboards or mechanisms by which you may be allowing quality of service to slip.
The other aspect – providing insight and data to enable you to know more about how your business in running; how many passengers are you handling, what are the trends that you’re seeing, its about unlocking that data to enable you to make better business decisions.
Task management
Another aspect of the solution is focused on task management, ensuring tasks are linked to movements and work is carried out on time and requests aren’t missed.
The task management capabilities, for which myairops is building companion apps to work alongside, Ford explained: “This drives many things, obviously it drives efficiency but it also improves customer service quality – if you’re an FBO and you’ve got someone coming in you can be prepared for them; you know what they want, what they need and you can be prepared to be able to process their needs and requirements.”
Speaking about the driving force behind the FBO product, Ford said: “We understand the importance of data and we think ultimately this is about how we can use data better in the future for more predictability, more machine learning and more business analytics.
“Effectively this is our first step into that movement,” he said, “The key item for us, and especially this being a cloud-based service, is that over time as customers are using the system and we are recording the data for those customers, we can start performing more predictive capabilities.”
This could reveal, Ford suggests, when airports experience a passenger influx, such as a regional influx based on trend data or whether some other impact such as inclement weather, a business or sporting event is causing relocated flights. He added: “We believe there’s an awful lot of data there that is going untapped and is not being used.”
These data insights, Ford suggests, will enable FBOs, airports and ground handlers to run their businesses more efficiently, being able to prepare if they know to expect more demand at certain periods of the year.
