How Virgin Atlantic transformed their records maintenance and lease returns by partnering with flydocs

At flydocs, we believe in partnering with our customers and have done so with Virgin Atlantic since our inception in 2007. By working closely with Virgin Atlantic on the ongoing development of Digital Records Management (DRM), the airline has helped to test and embed new systems or application improvements along the way, making sure that we’re developing the functionality that really matters to global airlines.

Throughout this piece, Virgin Atlantic talks about how the challenges flydocs has helped them to solve and how we’re building towards the future with exciting new projects.

What were your challenges before implementing flydocs?

Prior to the implementation of flydocs DRM, record keeping at Virgin Atlantic was all manual.  Records consisted of the paper copies only, held in a safe facility across many, many boxes.

Looking at the Boeing 747s we returned during Covid-19; after 20 years of service, the paper records for those aircraft amounted to about ten tonnes of paper.

Lee Butterfield, Former Head of Aircraft Programmes & Asset Management

Demonstrating compliance was very challenging, as trying to retrieve specific records was both time consuming and costly. This impacted our lease return process, as it needed to start many months out to complete the process on time. Before DRM, we would have been leafing through paper records, all of which would have had to come on site at the end of ease when the lessor would have access to go through them. The team would be sorting through physical boxes looking for individual records.

Why did you choose flydocs as a partner?

To put it simply, the strong business case we put together was all about efficiency. It was built around improved asset management and the compliance benefits realised through digitising our records. This would allow us to create efficiencies to reduce both costs and complexity in our processes.

Preparing records for lease returns would also be reduced from months to a few weeks, with additional cost saving on lease returns through the ability to remotely interrogate the records.

With flydocs, we have our records at the touch of a button, retrieved in seconds.

Lee Butterfield, Former Head of Aircraft Programmes & Asset Management

Everything is moving towards paperless now and while we still keep paper records, we look forward to a time we’re completely electronic. For example, we’re working towards enabling our Engineering and Maintenance teams to produce job cards on tablets and deal with returns transactions and queries electronically. So really, the flydocs approach was ahead of its time in terms of the drive towards paperless.

In terms of the software itself, flydocs is a very intuitive system compared to others where training can be cumbersome. The platform being intuitive was actually part of our decision to select them as a supplier. People saw very quickly how it saved them time and how it improved their ability to do a great job.

Did you encounter any change management hurdles?

With any new platform that is proposed, Virgin Atlantic follows an established and recognised change management and risk assessment process.

We have a very structured process for introducing new software and, as far as the regulator is concerned, we will always keep them appraised of any major changes we are making to our systems. Whether they would need to sign that off or approve it, we find that, given the close relationship we have with our regulators, we would always inform them.

While we keep our regulators up to date, there was no formal regulatory approval needed in this instance. We worked internally with our own Quality Assurance department who completed audits on flydocs and the DRM platform.

How was the implementation process?

The flydocs technical team came into the business and worked with our IT teams to integrate DRM with some of our existing compliance systems. flydocs DRM links compliance data with the maintenance records and this allows us to retrieve specific information at the click of a button.

The system also has additional functionality for tracking repair mapping which has been an industry issue for many years. As flydocs software is cloud-based, it assembles the records in such a way that, come lease return, the process is massively simplified, presenting extremely accurate and comprehensive records accessible from anywhere in the world.

For an IT-related system, there were very few problems experienced during implementation – from previous experience, we thought the set up would be far more challenging. Integrating the different systems was the main IT challenge we encountered which we overcame in several weeks by working in tandem with flydocs. Being a cloud-based system helped enormously.

After that, the flydocs team took around eight months to set up and load years of historic records for 44 aircraft onto the system, starting with the oldest fleet of Airbus A340s. Departments such as Airworthiness Records, Aircraft Acquisitions and Returns, IT, QA and Procurement were all involved in the project.

We sent RFPs to a number of document management companies, some with platforms far more established than flydocs, but today, there is no doubt we made the right choice for Virgin Atlantic.

As the platform transformed how people can get information at the click of a button, instead of trawling through boxes for many hours, there was clearly a very positive response from our teams.

How did training go to ensure your teams adopted flydocs successfully?

With the original implementation, there was an element of on-site training from flydocs, initially in a classroom. But most of what training happens now is bespoke for individual needs and online.

There is obviously some baseline training required but we find that different functions in the airline use flydocs for lots of different things. For example, maintenance technicians use the document repository for approvals, others input and update records and asset management teams interrogate and share records with lessors.

Therefore, instead of training everyone on every aspect of the system, we give training for users depending on what they’re doing. Instead of offering piecemeal training, flydocs will deliver virtual training plus written procedure notes if we have a number of new people join the team who need exposure to various system elements.

As we’re mainly on incremental training now, there’s very little need for face-to-face sessions and use a mix of online training and guidance material.

Once you’re into the system, it’s very straightforward having been refined over years of service to make it simpler to use. If anybody in our team does have an issue, they can simply tell us and we’ll direct them to the right person in flydocs – there’s nothing else that we have to do.

How did you update flydocs procedures for lease returns?

Before implementing DRM, all our procedures outlining  how the returns process works, interactions with the lessors and the timelines were manual.

As well as updating those instructions, one of the first things we do now with lessors at end-of-lease is highlighting DRM, how we use it, why we use it and to confirm that they’re happy to accept the platform as the medium for us to raise and answer queries.

Now, the lessor asks a question via DRM and it’s assigned to the appropriate team member at Virgin Atlantic who will identify the document, then send it back for the lessor’s assessment and approval.

Essentially flydocs simplified the process of rewriting our procedures by writing the use of flydocs platforms into the current documents. The actual process changes were minimal but included such things as tracking repair records, see above, which was an industry-wide challenge at the time. When it came to aircraft lease returns however, it transformed that whole process from start to finish.

We’ve been working with flydocs now for 17 years. In those years, we haven’t had one late redelivery.

Lee Butterfield, Former Head of Aircraft Programmes & Asset Management

As a future next step, we’re evaluating and working with our lessors with a view to moving over to full electronic records to support returns in the future: we’re not quite there yet but the basis of our returns process at the moment is flydocs DRM system. So, if a certain job card is needed or a dirty fingerprint for a repair that’s been done, we can access that all through DRM and produce those documents as scanned, whereas before it would have all just been by accessing the physical paper records.

How is your relationship with flydocs as a partner?

It’s great working with the flydocs team: we have a really good commercial and working relationship. There are well-established communications channels with various functions such as flydocs Support. If there’s any technical problems with the system, we usually know about it before it happens – for example, when there’s going to be  maintenance outage.

The great thing about flydocs is they employ aviation engineers. They speak the same language as us, they understand our requirements and needs and are always there to fix issues for us and work as a team.

Lee Butterfield, Former Head of Aircraft Programmes & Asset Management

Commercially, we have a very long-standing relationship so when it comes to renegotiating the contract or even down to detailed points around how things are working, there are well-established processes for handling that.

In summary, the flydocs team was extremely professional, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the project.

What outcomes have you realised?

We have gained significant savings in time and effort to store, maintain and interrogate records.

Efficiencies that a system like DRM brings can be a double edged sword: while systems can cut overheads, it often means less people are needed which needs to be factored in, planned for and handled carefully. However, in a sector where labour is at a premium, there might well be other opportunities for personnel to move to.

We can use our people for other tasks that are equally important in the lease return process.

Lee Butterfield, Former Head of Aircraft Programmes & Asset Management

Virgin Atlantic has been as efficient as possible and is always looking for new opportunities in our applications so we’ll always be interested in innovative businesses like flydocs who can support our growth and sustainability.

What are your future plans for working with flydocs?

We look to our work with flydocs as a partnership as opposed to traditional customer-supplier arrangements. We continue to work closely with the flydocs team to assess system enhancement and work together on developing the systems.

flydocs are looking into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – we’re very much on board with that. For us, where further automation and AI efficiencies could be built into the current applications would be of interest. Where there are still manual processes within the platform, we’d be interested to know how we could automate that and get AI working for us: for example, predicting outcomes, making recommendations and just making the whole end-of-lease transaction smoother through technology.

We’re already looking at the next steps of development with the flydocs team, which for us is great interest in the Lifecycle Asset Management (LAM) module.

Lee Butterfield, Former Head of Aircraft Programmes & Asset Management

We’ve gone through multiple asset returns, mid-term inspections, annual inspections and it’s all gone seamlessly.

We look forward to growing with flydocs and to seeing future innovations in the product because, like everything around aerospace technology, it’s ever evolving.

To find out how you can achieve 100% on-time aircraft redeliveries with flydocs, just like Virgin Atlantic, contact us for a free 30 minute consultation.