Improving Rapid Response to Crisis in Aviation & Airline Industry with KanBo

The disastrous effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted almost all businesses and organizations but there is no other sector that’s taken more damage than the aviation and airline industry.

According to a report issued by Deloitte, a reputed audit firm, the global airline revenues fell by US$160 billion to US$314 billion during the first nine months of 2020 and the situation continued to worsen over the next few months. In these challenging times, what many airlines and aviation organizations discovered was that they need to become adept at providing effective rapid response to crisis situations. That was the only way to ensure a seamless traveler experience while maintaining business operations.

While the solution is quite evident, the tools and infrastructure required for delivering rapid response have been absent. With circumstances evolving on a daily basis, airlines needed informational visibility, close coordination, and work transparency to provide adequate rapid response to crisis situations. The lack of transparency and quick access to required information along with siloed communication resulted in major challenges. KanBo software provides airlines and aviation companies with the opportunity to build a collaborative work environment that allows informed and high-performance decision-making.

Enhancing Rapid Response Strategy in the Light of Meeting the UN’s Sustainability Goals

Large organizations don’t just have to think about the financial concern but our planet too. They are mindful as far as the utilization of assets and creation of labor and products are concerned. Against the background of an Earth-wide temperature boost and environmental change, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has given targets and markers that enormous scope undertakings ought to accomplish to be more comprehensive and sustainable. That is the reason any airline and aviation organization today that is hoping to further develop functional effectiveness needs to adjust its objectives according to the UN targets.

Support Economic Development with Resilient Infrastructure

The primary sustainability target set by the UN expects companies to make top caliber, feasible, and versatile infrastructure. This demands incorporation of transborder and territorial infrastructure so the necessary assistance can be accommodated in terms of economic development and general prosperity by zeroing in on impartial and reasonable access in all cases.

Raise Industry Employment Share with Inclusive Industrialization

The subsequent objective is tied in with improving the aviation industry’s contribution towards creating opportunities alongside enhancing total national output by 2030 by advancing sustainable and comprehensive industrialization. The objectives should be lined up with local conditions so developing nations can twofold their contribution.

Improve Access to Small Scale Industrial and Financial Services

The UN needs large scale enterprises including airlines to work on the entrance of small scale ventures, particularly in developing nations, to improve access to financial services. This needs to incorporate reasonable credit and its joining into business sectors and value chains.

Enhance Resource Consumption Efficiency with Infrastructure Upgrade

One of the key targets set by the UN for large enterprises is to retrofit ventures and update existing framework by 2030 so they can accomplish sustainability objectives. This is expected to be finished with further developed asset utilization effectiveness and by introducing green initiatives and cycles.

Encourage Innovation by Enhancing Scientific Research

Many agricultural nations don’t have the assets and foundation to advance scientific exploration. That is the reason the UN has set the objective for companies to further develop their research and development and carry out mechanical updates in modern areas by 2030, especially in developing nations. This will assist with empowering advancement and increment the per capita number of innovative work laborers

Challenges for Deploying Rapid Response to Crisis in Airline and Aviation Organizations

It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged businesses globally but it has the most severe impact on airlines and aviation companies. From halting all domestic and international travel to complete restructuring and deployment of new, highly adaptive strategies, airlines have had to deal with a wide range of challenges, bottlenecks, and hurdles during the course of the last 18 months, particularly in terms of ensuring rapid response to a crisis. Some of the major challenges include the following.

1. Constantly Adapting to Evolving Safety and Health Regulations

One of the most critical concerns for aviation leaders has been to ensure that their rapid response strategies fully comply with changing safety and health regulations. Since COVID-19 is a completely novel strain of Coronavirus, our understanding of the disease, its repercussions, and the ways to manage it is still in the development phase. This means that health organizations around the world are constantly accumulating and assessing new data to devise an adequate course of action.

These continuously evolving circumstances have put aviation and airline companies in a precarious position where they don’t only need to monitor the latest developments but ensure their response to crisis also takes the new updates, regulations, and standard operating procedures into account. They need to redefine health, safety, and cleanliness metrics to enhance travelers’ confidence and ensure their safety.

2. Rebuilding Customer Confidence and Delivering Seamless Experience

When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines and aviation organizations find themselves in uncharted territory. Developing strategies for designing and implementing rapid response plans cannot occur in a vacuum as airlines and related businesses have to account for changing expectations of travelers. This means that airlines have to find the ideal balance between creating adequate and seamless rapid responses to crises while instilling confidence in customers. The unique requirements of an airline customer in the post-pandemic world cannot simply be overlooked.

This particular challenge requires airlines and aviation organizations to collect information from a diverse variety of sources including vendors, partners, health organizations, security agencies, and customers. More importantly, all the accumulated data is required to be processed and evaluated across different departments to come up with a robust rapid response.

3. Reconfiguration of Environment and Value Proposition

When creating a rapid response to crisis situations such as managing the state of air travel in the post-pandemic world, airlines find themselves cornered into a spot where they are in dire need to reconfigure the environment and value proposition. Getting your customers from one destination to another in an affordable and convenient manner is no longer the only priority as airlines and related businesses are now required to put the safety and security of the travelers above everything else. This has become especially challenging for airlines as they need to redefine their value proposition in a business environment that’s inherently hostile against them.

In such a tough situation, every piece of information, data, and insight can help airlines to develop a better understanding of both the circumstances and their customers. However, consolidation and communication of all the key data points and the absence of transparency make it quite an uphill battle to offer a reconfigured value proposition that’s baked into a rapid response.

4. Building Adaptability and Flexibility into the Workforce

If it was business as usual, creating and deploying rapid response strategies would’ve been much easier as all airlines and aviation organizations are prepared to face adverse circumstances. However, the pandemic has given rise to a unique situation where airlines have to accommodate a workforce that’s divided between two types of employees – those who are working from home and those who are essential to flight operations such as pilots and flight crew. What this means for airlines is that now they have to ensure effective communication and real-time collaboration between teams that are geographically separated.

This one-of-a-kind state of affairs has forced airlines to find more agile, adaptive, and flexible digital solutions, work processes, and business strategies that can accommodate new and evolving requirements to deliver a robust rapid response to crises.

How Airlines Can Overcome Rapid Response to Crisis Challenges with KanBo

1. Ensuring Top-Notch Security with KanBo

All projects, work processes, business information, and data are essential for an airline as they provide the competitive edge in a highly contested space. KanBo helps airlines and aviation organizations maintain an operational system of records with robust security in place.

Store Data in Any Location

Whether your airline is using a hybrid, cloud, or on-premise storage solution, KanBo enables you to find the perfect balance of expenditure, security, and regulatory compliance. KanBo helps a number of organizations with a variety of security strategies, delivering effective solutions within the airline’s security comfort zone.

Leverage Azure Active Directory

If your airline or aviation business depends on Azure AD and Active Directory for organizational security, you can use the AD groups to assign permissions in KanBo. With the ability to connect external KanBo User Groups (eKUG) to AD groups, specific roles can be assigned to Board Collections and Boards. This way KanBo seamlessly integrates into the airline’s security infrastructure.

Multiple Permission Levels for Granular Control

With KanBo, both airlines and aviation organizations can manage permissions or access levels in a seamless manner. They have granular control over permissions which provides the ideal balance between security and transparency. No dedicated IT resources are required and different teams can rely on permission to organize and manage themselves.

Disable Information Deletion

Although KanBo conceals delete features quite well in its platform, valuable information can be accidentally deleted by a user. That’s why Board owners have the option to simply disable the delete feature so the information and content can be retained. Instead, users can choose to archive boards and cards.

Immutability Powered by Blockchain

Regulatory compliance requires airlines to stay within legal limits while developing a rapid response to a crisis situation. KanBo relies on blockchain technology to foster good practices in the realm of regulatory compliance. KanBo delivers a unique blockchain module that ensures the immutability of the information recorded by streams of Cards and Boards.

2. Working from Home Made Easy with KanBo

KanBo delivers an especially offered range of remote work features that can assist airlines and aviation organizations to overcome their challenges when preparing a rapid response to crisis situations.

Real-Time Notifications for Enhanced Productivity

As it’s become quite difficult for airlines to align asynchronous work cycles of all employees in a remote work environment, real-time notifications provide a way to engage in work-from-home in an efficient manner as team members can continue their work from where they left. KanBo collects data related to every employee’s actions and translates them into contextual streams that are easier to understand. This allows a diverse workforce to work in tandem regardless of where they’re located and discrepancies in time zones.

Manage Informational Depth with KanBo Streams

KanBo gives managers and employees granular control over the informational detail they want to show in their stream. From small pieces of information such as renaming a list to more substantial updates like completion of a major task, they have the option to display the information they believe everyone needs to be updated about.

Highlight Dependencies with Block-Ups

When airlines have to come up with rapid responses in a limited time, delay in decision-making can have a wide range of negative effects on how others do their part. KanBo block-ups enable team members to highlight the work as blocked and write down a reason. They also have the option to mention users who are responsible for addressing the issue or resolving the matter so they can continue to work accordingly.

Acquire Insight Anytime through User Activity Stream

When thousands of individuals across different departments are working from their homes, the unavailability of a few employees on any day is bound to happen. In such a situation, other employees within the department can trust the user activity stream to learn about the history of the project or task they’ve been assigned and continue from where their colleague left off.

3. Integrate with Your Airline’s Software Infrastructure

Every modern airline and aviation business is dependent on a technology infrastructure that is critical to its operations. KanBo integrates with a diverse variety of technology stacks to cut down or completely eliminate downtime and improve business productivity.

KanBo On-Premises

As airline companies are required to ensure compliance with regulatory guidelines along with internal policies for security, it is quite logical for them to desire to remain within the comfort of their on-premises hardware infrastructure and firewall. KanBo on-premises gives airlines the operational flexibility they need so they don’t have to pick between security and functionality as they get both.

KanBo Integrated with Office 365

It doesn’t matter which Microsoft Office 365 plan the airline has deployed across its departments, KanBo gives organizations the option to natively integrate with Azure environment as well as Office 365. The integration can be achieved as an Azure Active Directory App or a SharePoint App.

KanBo as Software as a Service (SaaS)

Relying on the SaaS feature means the airline doesn’t require a dedicated IT department to make the most of KanBo. The airline deploying KanBo can also select the country where its data will be stored.

How KanBo Helps Aviation Organizations at Every Management & Operational Level

Any business that’s attempting to come up with a robust rapid response strategy requires a digital infrastructure that works at all levels. When the infrastructure is fragmented across teams and departments, it makes it difficult and more challenging to track work and information leading to inefficiency and redundancies. KanBo, with its basic building blocks, helps managers, team leads, executives, and employees in the same way as they can build and optimize their work processes and project plans accordingly. It doesn’t matter if you are an executive or just a part of a team, KanBo offers all the building blocks you need for different types of hierarchical setups.

For C-Level Executives – As Digital Headquarters

For top-level management, the overview of the business and bird’s eye view holds all the importance. KanBo provides them with a digital headquarters they need with quick and convenient access to strategy, tasks, projects, information, knowledge, documentation, internal communication, and organizational community along with integral applications. This means that they can make important decisions on the go without having to hold meetings and video calls every other day.

For Citizen Developers – As a Low Code Platform

When we talk about low code platforms, we refer to a visual approach in terms of software development that allows swift delivery of applications without manual coding. Low code platforms exist to make app development more mainstream, especially for citizen developers who are basically business users with very little professional coding experience. These may include project managers and business analysts. As a low code platform, KanBo enables employees to make a significant impact in a multitude of ways such as getting rid of IT department backlogs, eliminating shadow IT, and taking ownership of business process management (BPM) workstreams.

For Citizen Developers – As a No-Code Platform

No-code development platforms (NCDPs) enable coders and non-coders to create application software through GUIs and configuration features. They don’t use conventional computer programming which can be more complex. No-code development platforms like KanBo are closely related to low-code development platforms as both are designed to make the application development process quicker. These platforms have both increased in popularity as companies deal with the parallel trends of an increasingly mobile workforce and a limited supply of competent software developers.

Information Workers – As a Work Organization Platform

A process is a procedure that constitutes a sequence of steps that need to be deployed to produce a certain outcome. On the other hand, a project is a temporary course of action that aims to deliver a distinctive product, service, or result. To manage these processes and projects seamlessly, KanBo provides a central hub with all the features required by the employees, managers, and executives.

Conclusion

As the pandemic continues to dictate the terms, airlines and the aviation industry, in general, find themselves in a spot of bother. They need to adapt to the changes being enforced almost on a daily basis which has had a severe impact on their ability to design and execute rapid response strategies to crisis situations. As they face multiple challenges, KanBo enables the airlines to leverage its secure, highly functional, and collaborative platform to overcome these hurdles and deploy robust rapid responses in these taxing times.