Our business app connects pilots to flight operations center to improve business efficiencies

September 15, 2012

The following is the introduction of an AT&T case study on how our mobile business app improves productivity for one of America’s largest fractional corporate private aircraft companies – Avantair. Download the full case study here

For Avantair, efficiencies soar with mobile applications

About Avantair

Founded in 2003, Avantair is a fractional ownership air travel company headquartered in Clearwater, Florida. The company provides clients on-demand flights for both business and personal travel across North America, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean. Avantair exclusively flies the Piaggio P.180 Avanti aircraft; its speed and fuel-efficiency allow Avantair to offer better service at lower cost.

Situation

With its leading fuel economy, fly-when-you want scheduling and convenient monthly billing, Avantair makes travel extraordinarily efficient. Yet the company’s internal operations were slowed by paper-based business processes. Pilots sifted through pages of travel charts and checklists to plan and conduct flights. Communication from cockpit to operations center by fax and phone could be inconsistent, causing a lag in data transmission. Submitting flight data and paper expense receipts for invoicing was inconvenient and imprecise. To keep up with its own high standards of operation, Avantair sought to update its processes and improve communication between pilots and office staff.

Solution

Avantair introduced tablet computers equipped with ProntoForms from AT&T for on-board document access and data entry. The company has quickly created dozens of electronic forms for pilots to use when they’re on the ground within this one environment. Tablets connect to back-end systems, enabling near real-time two-way transmission of flight information and operating updates, while MobileIron VSP from AT&T, a mobile device management application, helps to provide a high level of security for the data. The solution cuts out wasted time and bulky paper piles, and it reduces security risks of paper-based processes while trimming invoicing time by weeks.

Integrate Twitter into your Mobile Enterprise Workflow in three steps

July 12, 2012

Not just a marketing tool – Data Tweets accelerate mobile business.

When you think of Twitter and business, most people think social media marketing, few would guess that it’s helping rent heavy construction equipment in Texas.  The power of Twitter is a real-time communications network available on any smart device.  Now consider replacing marketing tweets with “data tweets”, and you have a sophisticated infrastructure for improving the speed of business.

Clever CIOs are marrying mobile devices, business Apps and social media services, including Twitter, to share time-sensitive data with direct and measurable impacts on profits. One example, ROMCO Equipment, a company that rents trucks as big as a house, is using a dynamic mobile workflow with data tweets – helping them to turn around equipment for rental as much as six days faster.

“Companies involved in heavy construction and mining are being very judicious on large capital expenditures – they’re looking more and more to rent. We have a very extensive fleet of heavy equipment we rent for large projects.  Some of these include heavy highway construction, oil and gas infrastructure, and mining. Having multiple offices across Texas, it was crucial for us to know the exact availability of every piece of equipment in real-time. In today’s competitive environment, the old style paper process was too slow for us. Our Operations and IT team made a recommendation to move us away from paper and fax machines, to Samsung Galaxy Tablets and a Business App from AT&T called ProntoForms. Data collected from the field is shared via a private Twitter network to all of our operations and sales people across Texas in real-time. We run a traditional distribution business, but we use cutting edge mobile technologies to get the most from our people, and better serve our customers,” explained Charlie Clarkson, President of ROMCO Equipment Co.

The three integration steps

So how do businesses leverage this powerful real-time communications network? It’s plug and play, if you have the right tools.

One: Create your Private Twitter network

The administrator can create a Twitter account that allows only approved followers to see Tweets – this keeps all your company data tweets private from prying eyes. The administrator can also manage registered followers, they can be blocked or removed – crucial for handling an employee who changes departments, or who is no longer with the company.

Two: Identify Strategic Data to be shared and automate your Twitter Feed

Remember, Twitter allows only 140 characters – so you’re never going to Tweet all of the data you collect in the field. The key is identifying what is the most crucial data that needs to be extracted and shared. Of all the data that’s collected on a daily basis – there are crucial nuggets of data that can mean a major difference on productivity and profits. So once you have identified those nuggets, how do you extract them and connect them to Twitter? You’ll need an enterprise-grade business App that manages data workflow and connects to Twitter. Read on…

Three: Choose an Enterprise-grade Mobile Business App with Twitter connectivity

Accessing real-time data can transform your information workflow, but Twitter itself is not an enterprise data solution, it’s a communications tool.  Your business will require a Business App for smartphones and tablets that can interconnect with Twitter.

A quick rule of thumb, here’s what you should look for in your business App:

• Multi-mobile OS support – in an era of BYOD, you will likely have iOS, Android and Windows Phone users in the field

• Data moving from the office to the field. The Business App plays the crucial role of accessing back office data (price lists, inventory, resource availability…), or receiving dispatches from field managers in the office, or working remotely

• Data moving from the Field to Office. The enterprise App should be adept at submitting field data back to the office, and allow for connectivity of that data to the back office

• Consider multiple input options. Maximize the power of new smartphones and tablets. Not all data will be input through typing, consider whether or not the enterprise App handles barcode scanning, voice-to-text input, photos and even GPS stamping aggregated with data collected

• Administrator management of field users and preferences for inbound and outbound data routing in your workflow

Now, how do we extract the data nuggets? Enterprise grade solutions that can deliver on the above should also have the ability to quickly integrate and play with Twitter in a sophisticated way. The objective is to automate data extraction and sharing once the data is available – you don’t want your teams in the field involved in an extra step of sending tweets and being aggravated by character limitations. Here’s what you should look for:

• The administrator should be able to identify which employees, or which data collected (or a mix of both) will be tweeted, and set preferences without needing to physically handle the employee device

• Where multiple amounts of data are collected in one data submission, the Enterprise App should be able to extract specific fields to be tweeted

• Consider how the App handles different types of content. Photos, barcode scans, and how can these be integrated into tweets

Accelerate information sharing – accelerate opportunity

Considering the competitive advantage of empowering your employees with real-time data, CIOs need to explore where to start integrating this solution into their mobile workflow.  Like any new workflow deployment, we recommend starting small with one team in the field, 100 users or less, and then growing the solution across multiple departments. This way, you can test ROI and iron out the bugs for a larger enterprise roll out.