My first few weeks at flydocs

Julie Steadman, Head of Migration and Training

I joined flydocs on 16th November, in a newly created role, as Head of Migration and Training. Before that I was Principal – Strategic Airworthiness Records at Virgin Atlantic and had been there for over 19 years!

I initially entered the engineering department at Virgin Atlantic in an administrative role back in 1996. I quickly got the airline bug, moving to a position within the Technical Records team after just 22 months as an Airframe Officer, before specialising in Engines and becoming the Team Leader of that area. In my most recent role I was responsible for the management of the Assemblies and Airframe Airworthiness Records department and led a team of almost 25 people. We managed aircraft maintenance records for all 3rd party maintenance checks, approved cert processing for received components, setting, control and audit of all life limited components, audited all the line documentation including tech/cabin logs, work orders, updated aircraft/engine log books, end of month utilisation data for the airline, lessors and vendors, aircraft returns and acquisitions.

These previous roles have given me a great knowledge of the aviation industry in general, and specifically in technical records and aircraft returns. Having also lead the project to choose an aircraft records management platform, I have had good exposure to product capability and levels of service in the market.

However, in my new role as Head of Migration and Training with flydocs, there is still just so much to learn and that is making things really exciting for me. In addition to its 9 hub offices, flydocs has a team of people working virtually round the globe in order to service our international clients but also to reach the best talent, no matter where they live, so it allows me to tap into great internal service and ensure our clients are extremely well looked after.

I will primarily be working with new customers who are migrating their data to flydocs – whether this be paper or digital records coming from their previous records management system or from our competitors, as we are seeing more and more customers coming to flydocs from the other providers in the marketplace. As well as managing the migration projects mentioned above, I will also be working with these new customers on their training requirements and ensuring we design and deliver programmes that enable them to get the most out of the system to meet their specific needs.

This is a new role at flydocs created to ensure customers are well looked after as the business scales. We are expanding quickly and bringing on a lot of new customers, but the commitment and additional investment in on-boarding these new customers really sets us apart and should help further enhance their experience – which is the most important part of the process.

Being a new role it’s great to have the opportunity to shape things, but what I’m most looking forward to is working with the many different airlines we are serving. I really enjoyed spending last week out in Switzerland with one of our clients, learning from one of our training experts, but also being able to bring some of my experience from similar previous involvement on the client-side to the table.

It’s interesting meeting different customers and seeing a lot of airlines in the same position. Many are still learning about the evolving requirements of aircraft returns and the work required to support and achieve a successful on-time redelivery. The scale of the task, when also having to manage the business as usual routine workload, is huge! It’s great to be able to help and I’m looking forward to spending January working with some of our new customers in Europe and the US with their training and migration.