Digital Twin Webinar: Understanding the Retail Analytics Glow-Up
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How an aircraft brand improved the flying experience by digitizing critical pilot procedures into an easy to use application.
Reaching the end of its legacy software and understanding the competitive landscape around them, this aircraft company needed to upgrade its in-flight documentation system quickly. A new application would give pilots easy and rapid access to information and procedure alerts at all times, allowing them to efficiently and enjoyably climb to 30,000 feet without ever combing through the pages of a physical aircraft flight manual again.
The aircraft client needed a partner who could solve their unique problem of poor in-flight documentation. But, more than that, they needed a team that could help them hold their own in a competitive landscape.
A main driving factor for creating this application was the opportunity to make it competitive with another large airplane manufacturer’s tool. Knowing that pilots have the most influence on selling planes — especially planes with the best-integrated documentation — RevUnit’s job was to ensure that the potential flight-operations customer had every excuse to buy their aircraft from this company.
The physical manual, required by law to be onboard the aircraft, was 1,800 pages.lega
The previous version of the application worked more like an e-reader or Kindle that held the required documents, but the user still had to click through its pages to find the information. A pilot must have the ability to quickly navigate issues and in-flight errors.
The original in-flight digital application was forced to sunset due to Apple’s mandated upgrade.
They were losing designers and staff to their competitor’s application, and knew they needed to better compete in the market with their technology.
The aircraft client needed a partner who could solve their unique problem of poor in-flight documentation. But, more than that, they needed a partner who could help them hold their own in a competitive landscape.
A main driving factor for creating this application was the opportunity to make it competitive with another large airplane manufacturer’s tool. Knowing that pilots have the most influence on selling planes — especially planes with the best-integrated documentation — RevUnit’s job was to ensure that the potential flight-operations customer had every excuse to buy their aircraft from this company.
With the challenge of upgrading to a structured data system and making it a desirable option for pilots, RevUnit prioritized innovation and leaned into forward-thinking strategy and design. We were committed to being a part of the development and day-to-day building of the application. With ongoing support of prioritization and scope expansion from the client, the partnership was successful from the beginning.
The client had previously engaged multiple external vendors throughout the app development process, but RevUnit was the first to bring the application to life successfully.
Success was built on:
Timeline: 4-6 weeks
Key Activities:
Timeline: 6-8 months
Key Activities:
Timeline: 2-4 Weeks
Key Activities:
RevUnit took unstructured and semi-structured data, structured it, then built a user interface to make navigation easy and fast for pilots in the air. The client had all of the data pieces — so it was our team’s job to provide the data structure (organized documents) and advanced technology (digital document repository) they needed. It was no longer relevant to flip through the index of a manual or digital e-reader to locate the information that would explain each alert and the corrective measures.
Research can be seen as a four-letter word in business. A black hole where business value goes to die. But we start every project with research – because although it does take a little bit of time at the beginning, it ensures we run fast in the right direction.
In our research for this plane application, we learned that pilots must memorize large parts of the in-flight manual in flight school while the remaining parts are made accessible to them in the cockpit. The RevUnit team understood that our job was to ensure that the digital application displayed all of the information in a format most beneficial to them as users with the documents they don’t have memorized as higher priority.
We learned that the application also needed to house information such as aircraft identification, version info, admin support, store (updates), and settings (licenses).
Overall, the project's most challenging aspect was organizing the unstructured and semi-structured document collection data.
Replaced a cumbersome, 1800-page pilot manual
Decreased time it took for pilots to look up critical flight procedures.
Modeled best practices in agile the internal teams continue to use.
