Safety is a crucial element that is considered by customers when they decide to commute via aerial mode of transport. To keep this trust between companies and the beneficiaries of the travel intact, all aviation players ought to conduct regular infrastructural checks. Along with this, it also has to ensure its operations and services are in tandem with current technological upgrades.
These mechanisms are also important to help the industry actualize its expected growth potential of four billion US dollars by 2028, as stated by the Aviation Analytics Report, presenting further opportunities for the airline management to bring enhancements to its security component. To serve the current customer demands, airlines have to ensure their Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) services are in trusted hands.
One such company enabling airlines and MRO providers to maintain the highest standards of reliability and safety is Swiss Aviation Software (Swiss-AS), which is emerging as the most trusted aviation solution provider in contemporary times, with its AMOS software and customer-centric approach and providing durable, and technology-backed MRO software and services.
Under the leadership of Fabiano Faccoli, CEO, and a long-standing leadership team, the company draws on decades of experience as well as on a large customer community which contributes to the longevity and competitiveness of the product.
Let us read further to learn about the reasons behind its industrial edge!
Presenting the Aviation Industry with AMOS
The history of AMOS goes back to the year 1989 when Crossair (predecessor of Swiss International Air Lines) decided to develop its own MRO software and laid the foundation for AMOS.
In the beginning, the brand name AMOS stood for Airline Maintenance & Operational Systems, as the initial idea was to develop in-house maintenance as well as operations software. Furthering its marvels in 1992, the decision was taken to focus exclusively on maintenance – but to keep the name AMOS.
Ahead in the year 2004, the company Swiss Aviation Software was founded, a spin-off from Swiss International Air Lines. It was handed with the ideal set-up to develop its strengths as an MRO software provider while still being embedded in a strong and successful aviation context. To deliver in this highly specialized niche, the company decided to stick to certain objectives and principles.
The Primary Targets
A philosophy that is driving the company right from the beginning is not just establishing classical supplier-customer relationships but applying a partnership approach. Transparency, honesty, standing true to its commitments, and respect for other cultures are guiding the company to be recognized through its actions and outcomes in the market. The company’s prime focus is delivering long-lasting solutions while ensuring efficiency, providing users with enjoyable experiences, and bringing in digital transformation by empowering collaboration and data exchange across market players.
Fabiano expresses, “We want to actively participate in the definition of new data exchange standards and be active in many ATA data standardization working groups.”
Swiss Aviation Software strongly believes in the power of communities and is mindfully involving its customer base in the company’s products further development. The team comments, “We encourage customers to collaborate and thus enable knowledge and experience transfer and align on the next important features that the software should release and co-create them to reflect best practices developed by several customers.”
Along with collaboration, Swiss-AS is strongly focusing on providing customers full control of their data. This is ensured by giving customers the choice to process their data – how they want and with which software – and providing them maximum control on how their data is used.
Top-notch Offerings
The Swiss-AS company’s main product is AMOS. It has a desktop version and a suite of mobile applications supporting the engineer, store man, or pilot in his daily work.
While AMOS covers a very wide scope of aircraft maintenance, it is only one piece of the overall IT landscape. Besides other core systems for flights OPS, ground OPS, and finance systems, customers utilize special purpose software in specific areas of their operation.
One of AMOS’ strongest assets is its towering integrability. A large portfolio of APIs (application programming interface) enables customers to integrate AMOS with other applications and ensure fully integrated end-to-end processes, guaranteeing free data flow from system to system and eventually supporting the digitization and digitalization of a customer’s operation.
To ensure the company customers have the right performance, system availability, and security protection Swiss-AS also offers prudent use of AMOS in a cloud-based SaaS. This relieves customers from having to build up specialized knowledge and simplifies integration with other cloud-based services.
Additionally, one of the sub-services of AMOS is AMOScentral, which will provide an eco-system to connect all customer AMOS installations together (if a customer desires it), allowing other market players to connect their software solutions as well and providing the foundation for various types of data-centric services. It will make integrations simple, secure, and fast where data will be supposed to be keyed in only once. They believe that the AMOScentral Eco-System will be instrumental in supporting their customers’ digitalization projects.
The organization views implementing an MRO software primarily as not just a technology project, but a huge change process, especially as they strongly advocate adapting processes to the software and not vice versa. AMOS implements best practice processes that have been adjusted over the years to fit the needs of over 200 customers and also for new customers who can benefit from these build-in best practices. The reason why many customers select AMOS is that it is ready to use and doesn’t require months of customization or configuration. However, implementing it will still impact the way thousands of end users work every day and hence the team suggests, “Customers can capitalize on our implementation methodology which has been fine-tuned over the last 30 years and enables customers to manage the risks and challenges of such a large change project effectively and efficiently and at the same time ensures a fast return on investment by avoiding long and tedious implementation projects.”
Overcoming Challenges
The aviation industry is amplifying in terms of quality and quantity, but in delivering these it often faces certain challenges, for example, applying technology and eventually making better use of available data, requires careful data management with a strong focus on accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and validity of data. To excel in these different data dimensions way of working needs to change, which could take time to implement.
The processes of many aviation companies are paper-based and moving to a paperless setup is a significant change process for an airline or an MRO. According to the team, their biggest challenge in the coming years is going to be of further adjusting the software in a way to support the innovators and early adopters of fully paperless processes, but at the same time also work for customers which cannot make the move to paperless processes at the same pace.
The software will need to provide smart solutions to allow the co-existence of the analog and digital world over several years. One opportunity that the pandemic has provided to the industry is to accelerate digitalization. Resource shortages require one to do more work with less staff and hence, we want to provide solutions that will give automation and decision-making support to the industry. The baseline for task and decision automation is however high data quality. That’s why the team says, “Moving away from paper and mastering data management is a prerequisite to eventually benefit from the opportunities that new technologies and new algorithms are providing.”
Adapting to Market Orientation
Since the beginning, Swiss-AS is including its customers in the ongoing development of the product to provide customers the means to share their business needs. Sharing insights about how it is inculcating a customer-centric approach, Fabiano says, “We offer customers various possibilities to weigh the different ideas, which helps them identify value pools and focus the company’s work on those items which will have the biggest positive impact on the customer base.” For this, the company tries to identify launch customers for larger product initiatives and continuously involve them in the product development process through its agile practices.
Their other initiative of Value Proposition Canvas is allowing them to design products and services around customers’ needs and is helping the company produce outputs based on it to eventually reduce its misunderstandings about any requirements.
Their pre-sales activities provide a wealth of inputs to understand what challenges the market is trying to solve and how the products and services can make a difference. The company is also tapping into the knowledge and experience pool available within Swiss-AS along with including innovative technological solutions.
Taking Advantage of Innovative Technologies
At Swiss-AS, they use technology only if it gives them maximum benefits in upgrading customer experience. Fabiano explains, “We carefully monitor the emergence of innovative technology and even more carefully assess whether an investment will eventually pay off. One has to consider how much resources shall be invested in solving the industrial challenges of today or tomorrow compared to exploring what might work in 5 or 10 years.”
The company feels that it is important to check if its customers are either innovators or early adopters. New technology should ideally always be co-developed with such customers to ensure that real business challenges are solved. To serve this purpose, Swiss-AS introduced the first real digital signature, several years back, which is now the baseline for a fully paperless operation. It further envisions upscaling its growth by expanding AMOS utilities.
Planning Stratospheric Growth
The company is focusing on covering the needs of large airlines and large MROs for the past few years. With the recent go-live of Lufthansa and HAECO, they have proven that their software and its implementation capabilities are ready for large legacy carriers or large MROs.
Unveiling details about the next phase of the company’s operations, Fabiano expresses, “We have the target to further grow in this market segment, without neglecting the needs of the other market segments we successfully cover.”
Adding up, “Larger airlines and MROs have even higher expectations and needs in terms of integrability of AMOS with the overall IT landscape and that’s why we will further focus on improving and enlarging our APIs,” says Fabiano.
The company team opines, “Some customers would like the possibility to buy or build special purpose software around AMOS to cover very specific aspects of a process.” To fulfill this demand, the company will be increasing and easing the integration options to cater to such needs effectively. They also have plans of embarking on development partnerships to co-create special purpose software and offer it as an add-on to AMOS.
They are currently also developing an eTLB (electronic technical logbook) together with several launch customers. Elaborating on the agenda of its development, the team says, “By end of 2022 we plan the first in-flight tests, and the product will be finished by end of 2023 providing an unparalleled integration of the flight deck with maintenance and further reducing the need of paper and achieving higher data quality and quicker availability.”
The company believes that digitalization needs to span across companies and to boost the industry’s and its customer base’s digitalization, AMOScentral has been launched. It will span a virtual network across all AMOS customers and enable true digital end-to-end processes, e.g., requesting a quote for maintenance work, placing the order, executing the work, and eventually providing the invoice. But this Eco-System will not be limited to AMOS customers, and other industry stakeholders like OEMs, lessors, MROs, or even competitors can utilize it to offer data-centric services.
In addition to aerospace sectors like the fixed wing, rotary wings, search and rescue operations, and drone operations, the company is furthermore expanding its customer base into the Urban air mobility segment.
Customer Credence
“With the AMOS system, the maintenance, engineering as well as logistics functions at the MRO can be integrated seamlessly with the maintenance management. We can also comply with the rigorous requirements that govern aviation maintenance regulations at the parent company EVA Airways, along with our other airline customers. We are looking forward to experiencing the operational effectiveness and efficiencies delivered by AMOS.” –– Evergreen Aviation Technologies
“AMOS has streamlined our processes at AirAsia. To cite an example: Stock level alerts at each station have improved our operative business in such a way that AOG could be avoided several times.” –– Air Asia
“The professionalism of the AMOS team has allowed us high performance and stability in the use of the tools in our maintenance bases, also helping to minimize the costs of hardware.” –– Viva Aerobus
