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In the latest column from STACK.aero Catherine Buchanan, Director of Business Development, outlines the value of adopting evolving digital platforms to stay ahead in business aviation.
I wrote this column last week on an iMac. When I started writing, it was a great machine: intuitive, responsive, with useful tools, effective cybersecurity, and rich in software that enabled me to create a hopefully thought-provoking article.
It’s a platform I trust to deliver results, and I’ve been impressed by its performance since the first day I logged on. This week, thanks to updates, it’s even better. It has new features, promises greater productivity, more easily accessible functionality, and improved security.
When I purchased it a few years ago, it changed how I worked by immediately delivering what I needed with multiple applications easily accessed from a simple user interface. I also knew that there would modifications and new features added regularly. In a way, I was consciously purchasing an incomplete product, but I knew that with all it could provide immediately, my productivity would increase, and my commercial capabilities would strengthen. I also knew it would only improve as I used it and gave feedback consciously or unconsciously through automated reports. My input adds value and influences development.
Brokers have to manage immense amounts of data so need intuitive platforms.
Our customers believe that, like the iMac, the STACK.aero Business Operations System, BOS, offers transformational capability, and we encourage them to think of our tool as an ever-evolving system that continuously improves to deliver ever greater commercial opportunity, enhanced efficiencies and applications that simplify daily operations. Our agnostic design ensures we can future-proof the system and add, modify or adapt features according to user behaviour, changing market trends, and customer feedback. One better than the iMac, we can tailor the system to each customer’s needs.
STACK.aero Flight Programmes and Trips | Click on the image to enlarge.
Today, BOS customers are already benefiting from a rich portfolio of tools, which are included based on our years of experience in the charter broker and operator sectors. We understood where we needed aggregated platforms, how to consolidate information, and how to present it in useful formats. At the same time, we realize that upgrading from legacy systems to new, advanced options can be daunting. Many of our conversations with potential clients confirm that their work's multifaceted nature depends on disparate systems, inherent knowledge and the need to adapt to the continuously evolving business aviation landscape. For most, the numerous data sources seem to work well in isolation, but as systems become obsolete, colleagues move on, and company structures change, innate customer knowledge is lost or becomes impossible to replicate.
Legacy systems can be slow, unreliable, and difficult to integrate with modern tools; proprietary systems invariably become defunct, sluggish and outdated, and while they might work well at first, they do not necessarily keep pace with an increasingly digital industry where necessary information comes from multiple data points. Switching to modern, cloud-based software designed to scale offers significant advantages in operational productivity, data security, and scalability. It removes silos which, in the case of STACK.aero enhances passenger experience, streamlines operations and creates rich databases that support strategic planning for increased revenues.
Each flight requires management of multifaceted information that changes with each trip.
Our clients tell us how much they value the BOS software's tailored, real-time business overview. Their feedback shows that using our platform is typically 70% faster compared with their previous system, and reporting is 50% more efficient. We also know that as we add functionality, these percentages grow.
Sticking with heritage systems, where teams of people endlessly sift through data layers, siloed in diverse systems and experienced heads, means that organizations working in an increasingly competitive commercial sector are being left behind. Like an iMac user waiting for tomorrow’s upgrade before committing, there’s a real risk of missing out on using and influencing great functionality today for the sake of more features tomorrow. Adopting digital platforms that increase revenues, improve business operations, and enhance the customer experience is a natural next step in an increasingly digitized world.
From our perspective, this week, the STACK.aero platform is providing an invaluable resource for users, and as we continue to add new features, integrate new partner applications and augment functionality, it will deliver an even more sophisticated system next week.
BlueSky Business Aviation News | 17th October 2024 | Issue #768
