Vertical de Aviación

Air Operations Company Uses Cloud for Global Collaboration, Expects to Double Productivity

Business Needs:

Productivity has increased 18 percent a month since we moved to Office 365, and will easily double by the time all employees are trained and using it to its full potential.

Using Office 365, we’re looking at least a 50 percent reduction in the annual cost of operation, compared with our previous on-premises GroupWise solution, without any hardware depreciation.

– Sabrina Ford
Vice President of Regulatory Compliance, Vertical de Aviación.

Vertical de Aviación employees around the world must communicate with each other and with customers to coordinate flight schedules, logistics, maintenance, training, and other aspects of daily operations, including adherence to United States and host country regulations. Prior to 2010, when Sabrina Ford joined the company as Vice President of Regulatory Compliance, such communication was achieved using paper and personal email accounts. Shortly thereafter, she worked with local technology services provider WorkMagic to transition the company to a hosted email and collaboration service, delivered from the service provider’s data center in California.

The company’s goal was to transition from a paper-based environment to an electronic one, but several issues stood in the way. Ineffective email filtering resulted in more spam than legitimate email. Tasks that the company should have been able to complete on its own—such as setting up a new BlackBerry device—required seeking technical help. Collaboration features were limited, and the workflows that WorkMagic had built for Vertical de Aviación were unreliable due to issues such as geographic latency. “When moving a pilot from one country to another, we couldn’t reliably upload or download the required paperwork,” says Ford. “Ultimately, we were paying $14,000 per month for a solution that wasn’t meeting our needs.”

Solution:

WorkMagic recommended Microsoft Office 365, which brings together cloud versions of trusted Microsoft communications and collaboration products—including Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online, and Microsoft Lync Online—with the latest versions of the Microsoft Office desktop suite and companion web apps. Vertical de Aviación selected the Office 365 E2 plan, which includes cloud-based email, contact and calendar sharing, instant messaging, videoconferencing, PC-to-PC calling, a hosted business website, an internal collaboration site, premium antivirus and antispam filtering, around-the-clock phone support for advanced technical issues, and more. The company is purchasing Office 365 through the South Florida Digital Alliance, a nonprofit services aggregator that WorkMagic frequently recommends to help clients facilitate technology adoption.

Migration to Office 365 began in February, 2012. Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, WorkMagic migrated more than 600 mailboxes to Office 365, and built a collaboration site with 55 subsites, 158 workflows, and 600 document libraries containing more than 20,000 documents. “We implemented online forms and workflows to support everything from managing employee training to compiling all documentation for a personnel transfer,” says Frank Johnson, Director of Technology Solutions at WorkMagic.

Benefits:

Vertical de Aviación now has all that it needs for effective, global communication and collaboration. Key benefits of the company’s move to Office 365 include:

• Rapid, cost-effective adoption. Vertical de Aviación moved to Office 365 in two-and-a-half weeks, which includes the time it took to build all workflows and libraries and migrate all files from the old environment.
• Effective global communication and collaboration. Vertical de Aviación now has reliable email communication and digital workflows for all key business processes—including many workflows for processes that were deemed too risky to automate before. “Today, we can share relevant reports in real time, giving us immediate visibility into flight hours, crew usage, and more,” says Ford. “In the past, we had to make due with a weekly report. We’re also making considerable use of online meetings and teleconferencing. These are capabilities we didn’t have before.”
• Superior performance and reliability. Employees no longer experience slow uploads, timeouts, or other performance and reliability issues. This is because Office 365 is hosted at Microsoft data centers located around the globe—the same data centers that support its own global online businesses.
• Increased productivity. Reliable global communication and collaboration has reduced the effort required for many common tasks. “Productivity has increased 18 percent a month since we moved to Office 365, and will easily double by the time all employees are trained and using it to its full potential,” says Ford.
• Reduced costs. Monthly costs for Office 365 are about half of what Vertical de Aviación was paying in the past, even though it’s more efficient and easier to use today.
• Improved technical support. WorkMagic now can support Vertical de Aviación more responsively and effectively because it no longer needs to get help to perform many common tasks, such as provisioning a new BlackBerry device.
• Improved compliance and sales. Vertical de Aviación now can easily meet regulatory requirements for its global business presence. “We just finished a Federal Aviation Administration audit, which took a fraction of the time it used to,” says Ford. “In the past, we had to hand-carry records from country to country, resulting in a 15-day wait to create a report. Today, I can ask for a year’s worth of data and have it in 24 hours, with the added benefit of having it permanently archived on SharePoint Server. During the sales process, we also rely heavily on Office 365—it’s another area where effective, global collaboration and organized, accessible data is contributing to an improved bottom line.”

Source:

Microsoft Case Study: Vertical de Aviación

Partner(s): South Florida Digital , AllianceWorkMagic :