How KanBo Facilitates Close Coordination in Aviation & Airline Organizations

With most airlines and aviation organizations transitioning to a hybrid work environment that brings in-house and remote operations together, the need for close coordination between the teams and individuals has become more crucial than ever.

Effective communication and collaboration are what enable employees at every level to make informed decisions, execute a wide range of tasks, monitor and track the progress of different projects, and ensure business goals and objectives are achieved in a timely manner. In the absence of coordination, airlines can no longer function in an efficient way which has a direct impact on the quality of service.

As pivotal as close communication and coordination is to an airline’s success, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to adapt and adjust their operational methods to ensure business continuity. Although all major airlines have taken steps to circumvent the challenges posed by the recent events, it’s not an option for them to implement a fully remote work environment.

There are many aspects of the service that require the physical presence of certain teams such as flight crew and air traffic control. This means that airlines and aviation businesses have to go for a hybrid model where some departments and teams can continue to do their job from the comfort of their homes while others have to show up. This predicament has led to a multitude of challenges when it comes to ensuring close coordination.

KanBo software is a collaborative work management platform that solves the very problem for airlines enabling all teams, whether remote or in-house, to continue their work without any communication gap.

Close Coordination in Aviation Industry Can Help It Meet Sustainability Goals

The global manufacturing sector received a huge damage as a consequence of the COVID-19 issue, falling by over 7% in 2020. Many industries, notably the aviation business, depended on R&D to jumpstart economic recovery and restore services, which had been hit by a severe economic downturn than the 2008 financial crisis. Global GDP shrank by 16 percent, and growth slowed to a trickle. During these tumultuous times, disadvantaged people and developing nations experienced a period of economic and social devastation.

The United Nations (UN) Department of Economic and Social Affairs issued objectives and indicators for large-scale enterprises, particularly aviation companies and airlines, to concentrate on sustainable industrialization and resilient infrastructure, based on the circumstances in a number of nations. The following are some of the most important goals.

Create Infrastructure That Is Sustainable, Inclusive, And Resilient.

The UN’s principal goal is to build dependable, robust, and long-lasting infrastructure to support economic growth and human well-being. According to the United Nations, organizations should focus on ensuring that everyone has equal and affordable access.

Industrialization That Is Both Sustainable And Inclusive

To boost the industry’s contribution of GDP and employment by 2030, the United Nations thinks aviation companies should invest in supporting sustainable and inclusive industrialization. The organisations should make it a goal to double their share in developing nations, and the aims should be aligned with regional realities.

Expand Small-Scale Enterprise Access

Many individuals in developing nations have little or no access to financial and other services, such as inexpensive treatment and health insurance. Aviation companies and airlines should strive to increase access to small-scale businesses in order to increase penetration.

Increase Resource Efficiency And Use Green Technologies

Another goal set by the UN for businesses is to refit industries and modernise infrastructure by 2030 in order to promote sustainability. They must also concentrate on the use of clean and environmentally friendly technology in order to improve resource efficiency and industrial operations.

Encourage Scientific Research And Innovation

Large firms, particularly in developing nations, should concentrate on driving innovation, boosting scientific research, and upgrading the technical capability of their industrial sectors by 2030. The stages in the procedure are as follows:

• Encourage and assist developing nations in establishing robust and sustainable infrastructure for improved technical, financial, and technological assistance.
• Assist poor nations in fostering regional and local innovation, research, and development.
• Make communication and information technologies accessible in a timely and comfortable manner, as well as provide inexpensive and broad internet access.

Major Challenges for Airlines and Aviation Businesses in Absence of Close Coordination

Collaborative work management is a philosophy that enables organizations to focus on collaboration and communication. It involves reliance on a diverse range of tools to help teams set direction, communicate, execute tasks, track progress, and achieve business goals. However, in the current environment when airlines are up against brand new challenges, building a collaborative work management infrastructure hasn’t been an easy task.

1. Subpar Planning and Lack of Predictability

Whether it’s about opening a new air route or ensuring effective aviation management, every aspect of executing flight operations requires robust planning and predictability to ensure quick and informed decision-making. With the pandemic impacting the entire world, the circumstances are changing on a daily basis which puts airlines and aviation organizations in a sensitive predicament. From changing rules and guidelines of different regulatory bodies to border closures and travel bans, every bit of information needs to be taken into consideration to deliver a seamless traveler experience.

This primary objective can only be achieved when airlines can coordinate all these interconnected activities as efficiently as possible within the organization, take quick but high-performance decisions, communicate with each other and provide the required assistance, to ensure every customer gets the highest quality service. However, owing to detached and separated teams, close coordination for planning has become a major challenge.

2. Difficulty in Delivering Rapid Response

With the pandemic wreaking havoc all across the globe, airlines have to stay vigilant and aware of the most recent developments and act accordingly. They need to come up with rapid response strategies to crisis-related travel restrictions and reduction in demand. For example, almost all airlines had to go through flight schedule reduction at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This cannot be achieved unless all teams and departments are alert and on the same page. Without effective communication and close coordination, employees often find themselves working with no or outdated information which eventually leads to a subpar experience for travelers.

3. Maintaining Public Relations Turns into a Struggle

For all major airlines, it’s not just about providing the highest quality air travel experience but representing their respective countries. They’re basically airborne ambassadors of their nations which means they need to reach out on a regular basis to establish and maintain lasting relationships with foreign stakeholders including aviation organizations, other airlines, regulatory bodies, and more. To achieve this, constant communication and collaboration channels need to be maintained, not only internally but with external parties as well. The lack of established and reliable communication channels can result in below-par public relations management which isn’t ideal for maintaining long-term reputational excellence.

4. Trouble in Meeting Special Demands and Goals

In current circumstances, airlines and aviation organizations have no choice but to deal with a multitude of uncertainties and a number of variables. Whether they need to plan special flights for cargo-only or repatriation or identify the opportunity for ramping up demand structures, it requires real-time communication and collaboration between different teams across the airline to ensure appropriate flight scheduling. If there’s no collaborative work management along with adequate business process implementation, it often turns into a major struggle for airlines to ensure all of such special demands and requirements are met in a seamless manner without any hassle and excessive use of resources.

5. Ensuring Close Coordination between Internal and External Interfaces

Optimizing flight network’s earning potential is at the core of every airline’s business, particularly in these challenging times. This requires close coordination between teams and individuals so they can accumulate robust and well-rounded knowledge of the market that enables them to learn about their competition’s schedules and how they can be more ambitious and traveler-friendly. This entire process hinges on a thorough evaluation, multiple discussions, team meetings, sharing of ideas, and seamless access to data and insights so quick but high-performance decisions can be made.

How KanBo Enables Airlines to Deploy Collaborative Work Management

KanBo software delivers a versatile and highly engaging working platform that empowers airlines and aviation organizations to gather relevant data, visualize information, ensure real-time communication and close coordination, offer improved work visibility, and manage a diverse variety of business processes across multiple teams. This enables a large and complicated organization such as an airline to foster a collaborative work management culture.

Working with KanBo for Close Coordination

According to a report by Owl Labs, a large organization’s employees spend almost 80% of their time on tasks that add little to no value and only 20% of the time is spent on crucial things that actually add value. KanBo removes these barriers through a diverse variety of features.

• Establish a Culture of Close Coordination & Collaboration

KanBo allows airlines and aviation businesses to engage all of their teams by gathering all the discussions, documents, and business processes to a single platform. This ensures real-time close collaboration leading to seamless work progress and the ability to achieve shared objectives.

• Improve Cross-Team Communication & Collaboration

Since airlines manage large volumes of data and information, KanBo offers complete informational transparency that’s key to foster an environment of trust and understanding within organizational teams. This level of coordination enables every individual to learn their role, identify challenges, and work in a collaborative manner.

• Enable People to Embrace Diversified Work Styles

As pandemic-related information is changing on a regular basis, airlines need to make adjustments accordingly. KanBo allows such large-scale enterprises to adapt their business processes enabling them to implement tailored approaches that align with the type of the project and their preferred work style. This means it becomes much easier for people to collaborate and coordinate for improved productivity.

• Combine Strategy with Implementation to Enhance Results

KanBo is a highly versatile work management platform that offers airlines a comprehensive overview of the current status facilitating them to make high-performance decisions and execute the plans efficiently. KanBo provides insightful visualizations to help airlines identify different situations and come up with rapid responses as changes happen.

• Enable Quick Yet Informed Decision-Making with Access to Insights

As airlines have to make fast but informed decisions, they require quick access to data analytics and insights. KanBo’s live dashboards and reports enable airlines to access all the relevant information they need for improved decision-making and planning. Easy access to the right data facilitates real-time coordination between individuals as well as teams.

• Enable On-the-Go Coordination with KanBo Mobile

It doesn’t matter if an airline’s employees are commuting to the office or in between meetings, KanBo offers a wide range of offline features that allow everyone to stay in touch on-the-go.

• Facilitate Agile Scrum Teams and Projects with Collaborative Management

Since pandemic has forced airlines to adopt a hybrid working environment, KanBo’s Scrum features allow them to circumvent technical and geographical challenges to enhance the effectiveness of horizontal and vertical communication. This puts agile Scrum teams in a better position to collaborate, coordinate, develop, and optimize in time to complete their projects.

• Kanban Brings Collaborative Efficiency with Seamless Work Monitoring

Using Kanban, airlines can supervise and monitor work progress related to all types of projects and ensure enhanced collaborative work management across a number of departments. Kanban cards deliver useful workflow visualization while data analytics provide insightful statistics to streamline processes for better real-time coordination.

Fostering Enterprise-Wide Work Collaboration

KanBo is a multidimensional work management tool that enables a number of talents to develop and nurture a mutually beneficial work environment that encourages learning from each other enhancing productive interaction and engagement.

• Use KanBo Cards to Manage Work Contexts

A KanBo Card accumulates relevant work insights from all the recent developments and updates within a department. It provides work contexts that are well-defined, organized, and get updated in real-time. When an airline’s teams are working from different locations, they can rely on cards to monitor progress as they provide work visibility and informational transparency.

• Document Groups Enable Effective Management

Airlines have to deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of documents on a daily basis. KanBo enables teams to organize similar documents into groups for better management. These groups can be moved up and down and collapsed and expanded as necessary to comply with the team’s workflow and individual work focus.

• Allow Perpetual Communication with Card Activity Stream

As teams delve deeper into their work pipeline, it can become a major hassle to make sense of all the scattered dates, remaining work, current progress, relevant documents, and everything else. With Card Activity Stream, every department has access to the bird’s eye view of everything that’s happening to provide clarity and transparency.

• Enable Contextual Communication with Mentions

If a certain individual or group of people are involved in a project, KanBo allows managers as well as authorized users to mention them to facilitate instant communication. With a quick exchange of relevant information, KanBo makes sure that each team member is on the same page. Overall, this creates a culture of a collaborative work environment.

• Streamline Work and Processes with To-Do Lists

Many processes and tasks appear to be quite complicated but they can be simplified by relying on KanBo’s to-do lists. They allow users to break down big tasks into smaller doable actions reducing the perceived complexity and burden of that task.

Quick and High-Performance Decision-Making with KanBo

Airlines require a robust framework that puts them in a better position to make fast decisions, accomplish tasks, and innovate on a regular basis. KanBo offers all the tools an airline might need to create a collaborative work environment that ensures work visibility and informational transparency for enhanced decision-making.

• Board Filtering to View Progress from Multiple Perspectives

KanBo brings a wide range of filters that allow managers and team members to view the entire picture as well as zoom in on the smallest details of a particular project. These filters enable them to select from a wide range of parameters including dates, statuses, users, labels, and card names.

• Gain Focused Perspective with Card Grouping

As every KanBo Board contains a large volume of information and work contexts, sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming. Card Groupings allow managers and team leaders to circumvent all the complexity and focus on a single aspect of the project. These groupings can be done by lists, users, labels, and due dates.

• Leverage Ambient Intelligence with KanBo Bot

It’s a digital assistant especially designed by KanBo to help large organizations like airlines and aviation companies to make the most of the work management platform. The bot is available 24/7 and provides smart assistance enabling employees to feel a sense of inclusion and equality across teams.

How KanBo Assists Aviation Companies in Driving Close Coordination

When it comes to disruptive innovation, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a tiny startup or a huge corporation; you need access to an agile and comprehensive digital platform that serves as the hub for all of your work and business operations. That’s where KanBo, a flexible and agile work and business process management platform, may come in handy for any company, no matter how big or little. Aviation companies can assure work visibility and information openness with KanBo, and they are no longer obliged to construct silos that frequently stifle collaboration between departments that should be working together to develop new ideas and innovation.

KanBo includes all the building pieces for all forms of hierarchical configurations in any firm, whether you are an upper management executive or a team employee.

KanBo serves as a digital headquarters for C-level executives

Top-level executives may utilise KanBo to find strategies, projects, tasks, knowledge, internal communication, news, organizational community connections, and critical applications. The platform serves as the focal centre of your transformational innovation strategy, not only as an agile work management tool but also as a digital headquarter for senior management. Aviation executives can see the broad picture with KanBo’s overview and have instant access to data and analytics in a highly visual format. This allows them to make rapid yet educated judgments that may benefit the organization’s overall innovation strategy.

KanBo offers a low-code platform for citizen developers to use

Low-code refers to a visual approach to software development that allows for quicker application delivery with less hand-coding. Low-code platforms democratize app development, especially for “citizen” developers – business users with little to no professional coding knowledge, such as business analysts or project managers. These technologies allow non-technical personnel to have a bigger effect on the company in a variety of ways, including lowering IT department backlogs, minimising shadow IT, and taking greater ownership of BPM workstreams. This results in a more efficient operational design, which is critical for generating transformational innovation.

KanBo as a no-code platform for Citizen Developers — KanBo is a no-code platform for folks with no programming knowledge

Instead of depending on conventional computer programming, which may be significantly more difficult, no-code development platforms (NCDPs) enable programmers and non-programmers to construct application software using graphical user interfaces and setup. Coding requires a degree of expertise and experience that many middle managers and workers may lack. KanBo and other no-code development platforms are similar to low-code development platforms in that they both aim to speed up the application development process. As corporations cope with the concurrent trends of an increasingly mobile workforce and a limited supply of qualified software engineers, these platforms have grown in popularity.

Information Workers – KanBo serves as a project and process management tool

A process, in basic terms, is a well-defined method that entails a series of stages that must be completed in order to achieve a result, while a project is a transitory course of action that strives to offer a unique product, service, or outcome. KanBo offers a targeted platform with all the capabilities necessary by workers for managing and handling various processes and projects in a smooth way. Information workers from a variety of teams and departments may efficiently coordinate and cooperate using the software’s building pieces.

Conclusion

As the circumstances around the COVID-19 pandemic continue to change, airlines and aviation organizations often have to adapt quickly which has increased the importance of real-time collaboration and coordination. The airlines have found themselves in a precarious situation where they need to ensure effective communication at all times. Uncommunicated information, the absence of real-time collaboration, and no effort to develop a collaborative framework can lead to major operational challenges.

In this highly challenging environment, KanBo software provides all the features in a single comprehensive collaborative work management platform that airlines and aviation companies have been looking for to become more communication-focused.