Comply365
How Comply365 helped Wizz Air Speed Up its Operational Content Management Process

Today, airlines have to constantly improve their overall operations to run efficiently, safely, and in compliance with regulations. However, given the complexity and volume of operational documentation, many airlines struggle to manually manage and distribute the technical information required to utilize their complex assets. It’s then a no brainer that managing aircraft and airline operational documents—including their revisions— is critical to improving the efficiency in flight and ground operations. As one of the largest low-cost airlines in Central and Eastern Europe, Wizz Air is renowned for efficient processes and its innovative approach toward high utilization of its assets. Wizz Air currently operates a total fleet of 120 Airbus A320,Airbus A321 and Airbus A321neo aircraft while offering more than 700 routes from 25 bases, connecting 152 destinations across 44 countries.

Hurdles on the Way

Taking into consideration the importance of efficiency for airlines, the lack of control over operational content is a significant challenge. It results in very manual and high-cost processes to manage and distribute operational updates (from airline technical publications teams and other back-office stakeholders in the operational content management process), and primarily PDF-based operational content delivered to frontline operators like flight crew and ground operational personnel. PDF-based operational content makes it hard for frontline operators to find the right content at the right time. Being one of Europe’s fastest-growing airlines, Wizz Air needed an innovative way of increasing the efficiency and quality of the operational content management process to support its growth. With its Airbus A320s, A321s and A321neos, Wizz Air operates one of the youngest aircraft fleets in the world. Both of them fly under two AOCs (Air Operator Certificates): Wizz Air UK, based in London Luton and Wizz Air Hungary, based in Budapest. Since the two airlines share the same aircraft types, significant portions of the content of their flight operating manuals can be sourced once and then shared for efficiency. Perfectly poised to address the needs of Wizz Air was Comply365—a leading provider of enterprise SaaS and mobile solutions (on iOS, Android, and Windows operating systems) for operational content management and document distribution. Comply365 provides a modern and innovative, cloud-based software platform to help companies author, manage and distribute operational content to frontline staff (flight crew, mechanics, airport operations staff, rail conductors, and engineers) while tracking compliance across the entire content management process. Wizz Air chose Comply365 to transform its content authoring process with Comply365’s end-to-end content management and distribution platform, for both Airbus and company operational manuals. “We wanted a modern and scalable tool for our operations departments to author and maintain a single set of common content and leverage it across our network. Comply365 offered the right tools to us to interlink our manual processes and limit the manual entries so that we can individually achieve the best outcome for our department,” asserts Heiko Holm, COO of Wizz Air.

Comply365’s Approach and Solution Delivery

In order to support its growth strategy throughout and beyond Europe, the airline recently accepted delivery on the first of 256 Airbus A321neo aircraft. But with that ongoing delivery, the major challenge was that the carrier needed a faster way to author aircraft operations manuals to bring the new aircraft into service without delay. To understand the key business objectives of Wizz Air, Comply365 followed its standard onboarding process, where its expert team got aligned with the requirements and needs of Wizz Air. The airline needed to reduce the amount of time that they’re spending on editing the XML based operational content by at least 50 percent. As a solution, Comply365 offered its complete web-based content management platform that eliminates the need for multiple solutions throughout the authoring process.

Comply365 provided us with an innovative, scalable, and accessible platform that will scale with us as we grow

Comply365’s operational content management platform—ProAuthor— provides a single, consolidated authoring solution for aircraft manufacturers and company manuals, using a familiar, easy-to-use editor with structural controls and the ability to reuse data.

By incorporating automated workflows and standards tracing, targeted distribution to mobile users and end-user compliance tracking, ProAuthor simplifies and unifies complex authoring, revision, and distribution processes, while eliminating data duplication. ProAuthor can repopulate effectivity statements from manuals in existing, identical aircraft manuals seamlessly. “We have a strong working relationship with Wizz Air at all organizational levels and are excited to assist them in streamlining and modernizing their authoring process across multiple subsidiaries. Our solution allows Wizz Air to drive process efficiency, reduce duplicate work and complexity and help them maintain standards across all their manuals with embedded decision making and automated processes,” states Tom Samuel, CEO, Comply365.

“We wanted to eliminate this very time-consuming manual process and aim at publishing manuals much faster, more efficiently, and accurately. Comply365 provided us with an innovative, scalable, and accessible platform that will scale with us as we grow. Comply365’s editor makes it relatively simple for anyone to author aircraft manufacturer or company manuals in XML,” explains Holm.

The implementation of ProAuthor at Wizz Air was done very efficiently, with Wizz Air able to get value from ProAuthor within six months. Comply365’s expert team trained a core group of Wizz Air users to be the administrators of ProAuthor. This enabled them not only to use it regularly but expand its usage within the airline. “We’re proud to support Wizz Air’s technical publications team, as well as the frontline staff - pilots, cabin crew, ground and maintenance teams with the operational content and insights they need for making critical decisions. The dedication and approach of both teams have contributed to the success of our project overall,” states Samuel.

Today, Comply365 is the go-to solution provider for content management and document distribution in highly regulated industries, including aviation, rail, and energy. Frontline staff at various major airlines around the world, including American Airlines, Southwest, JetBlue, WestJet, and Cathay Pacific Airway (pilots, flight attendants, maintenance technicians, or ground operations personnel), rely on Comply365 for digital delivery of operational manuals. Almost 10 years ago, the company played an instrumental role in the FAA’s approval of replacing the traditional, paper-based pilot flight bags with electronic flight bags (EFBs) and partners with clients unlike other service providers to transform industries. “We were part of the industry movement to move away from paper to more digital forms of distribution. We have now developed our ProAuthor platform to enable the next wave in operational content management—one in which the back-office technical publications environment is simplified and automated, PDF document delivery is eliminated, and operational content is delivered to frontline operations staff in a much more targeted manner,” concludes Samuel.