4 minute read
VENDOR FLIGHT LOG: CONDUCE
VENDOR FLIGHT LOG: CONDUCE GROUP LTD.
Hayley Russell explains how an ETL with a focus on being the very best has made Conduce a valued partner for many airlines today
Hayley has been working in aviation since 2017, but her experience goes back to her early years. Growing up in and around the aviation IT industry instilled a passion for quality solutions that provide genuine benefits. Her career has been varied, covering everything from hands-on workshop R&D to project management to corporate sales contracts. At present she’s focusing on getting the word out about ETLs through digital marketing and industry events.
Aircraft IT: Your name, your job title, and the name of the business?
Hayley Russell: Hayley Russell, Marketing Manager at Conduce Group Limited.
Aircraft IT: How did Conduce get started?
HR: Conduce entered the Electronic Technical Logbook (ETL) market in 2012, after taking over the Osys contract from Rolls-Royce to support the ground-breaking ETL for MyTravel, which later became Thomas Cook UK. After a few years supporting the Osys product, in around 2014 we created eTechLog8 from scratch. This was because three things happened.
First was the new Windows 8 supported XAML, which enabled us to write code for touch applications on Windows; the second was the release of the Panasonic ToughPad and, finally, the advent of 3G/4G comms, which opened the doors for a touch-tablet based and truly mobile ETL application.
Aircraft IT: What is the guiding business principle that drives Conduce?
HR: Our guiding principle (and one you’ll hear us say all the time!) is KISS — keep it simple stupid. So many ETL projects fail due to scope creep or trying to change too much at once. For instance, we want to make the best ETL in the world and that’s why we don’t do anything else.
Aircraft IT: What has Conduce’s greatest business achievement been to date, and why?
HR: Our greatest business achievement is the creation of an Electronic Tech Log that genuinely helps everyone in the cockpit and on the line to do their jobs. We’ve achieved this through the marriage of our IT and software knowledge and our real-world experience of the line engineering and cockpit environment. Any software company can write an app, but without really understanding the pressures involved in an aircraft turnaround (from 20 minutes with an ATR to 3 hours with an A380) it’s very easy to create something that looks shiny and great but simply doesn’t work. In addition, we know that an ETL isn’t just an app: it’s mission critical, so it must be a whole package of software processes, operating procedures, essential backup solutions and red-hot support.
Aircraft IT: What have been your disappointments and what have you learned from them?
HR: Our biggest disappointment is that the industry has been so slow to embrace Electronic Logbooks. The benefits are huge, the airline pioneers have proved it can be done and digitization has been the buzzword of the last decade. Yet very few airlines have implemented ETLs to date. At Conduce, we have learnt an awful lot from every single successful ETL project and really honed our approach. We now see the benefit of that experience reflected in the average project time, which is routinely three to six months from contract signature to full paperless approval.
Aircraft IT: In a sentence, how would you summarize what Conduce does for aircraft operations customers?
HR: eTechLog8 provides accurate, real-time aircraft utilization and defect data.
Aircraft IT: What do you feel will be the next big thing in operations Aviation IT?
HR: I think the next big thing will be extracting the full value from the data we’re already collecting, probably via big data tools. We’re in a place now where there are so many systems, like ETLs, collecting data that isn’t really being used to its full potential. eTechLog8 uniquely talks to lots of other
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airline IT systems so we really see the challenges of integrating different generations of technologies and data formats. Once the industry figures out how to merge all that data together and analyze it effectively, then the data becomes infinitely more powerful.
Aircraft IT: What do you want your customers to say about Conduce
HR: The most important thing we want our customers to highlight is the quality of our support. We like to hear them say that the Conduce team are always available, helpful, knowledgeable and able to solve problems quickly, before they snowball. An ETL is a mission critical front-line system that requires genuine 24/7/365 mission control center style support, provided by real people with the capability to remotely assist any user — instantly.
