Global Airline

Challenges

Full service, global airlines, serve millions of customers every year, traveling to hundreds of destinations in often more than 70 countries worldwide. For the leading airline in the United Kingdom, delivering their core values, which include demonstrating a unique combination of unrivaled flying know-how along with a personalized and thoughtful service experience has always been a top priority.

Checking customers in for their flights is an important part of the experience that needs to be as seamless as possible. An internal review revealed the airline’s current 40-year-old checking-in system was inefficient and cost-prohibitive, so they started the lengthy process of implementing a new system that would be used by their staff worldwide.

For the global airlines, major training challenge accompanied the new system. The airline needed to train 17,500 staff located in many different countries and time zones on the new system in under 6 months. The Manager of Airline Learning of the Global Learning Academy says, “Previously, we used a traditional approach of creating training flights and had a large training team that would create a number of virtual flights for each user.

She knew there must be a better and more efficient solution out there; one that would not only save them time and money but also deliver a realistic and user-friendly experience for their end-users.

The end-users would then be trained in a classroom environment, but it was a very expensive and time-consuming way of creating training. Dummy data needed to be created for every user and a lot of resources were taken up to do this process.”

She knew there must be a better and more efficient solution out there; one that would not only save them time and money but also deliver a realistic and user-friendly experience for their end-users.

Solutions

Solution

The Global Airline sent out a tender with their requirements. Four companies responded and Assima was selected to be their solutions provider. “The Assima Training tool was the only product we had seen that could emulate our live application. We were looking for a training solution that provided a replica of our live systems - that looked and felt exactly the same as the real thing so that users didn’t know any different, and the Assima Suite solution met our needs.”

“The Assima training Suite was able to quickly clone the core applications for the airline’s critical software for both long and short haul flights. An on-site Assima consultant worked closely with the team to build the training content for various projects and processes related to the software, including opening flights, checking and boarding customers, plus closing long and short haul flights. Twelve different modules were developed in approximately 10 weeks which kept them on track with their training plan.

Now, training is delivered to end-users in a classroom environment as a blended approach. In addition, there are also self-guided modules available online which are designed as refresher learning content for the user to complete and review in their own time. More than 15,000 customer service colleagues have completed the learning so far across multiple locations including Heathrow Airport and overseas stations. The modules have also been used for new station start-ups such as Nashville USA. The courses vary in length from a few hours to 3 days.

Results and Benefits

By switching from a traditional training approach to the Assima Suite, the airline has managed to significantly reduce their training costs and shorten the length of their training courses by 30%.

Over £630,000 saved in optimizing training flights

Before implementing the Assima Suite, multiple dummy training flights needed to be set up for use by each training delegate to practice transactions and processes. Due to the bespoke nature of these courses it meant they were very costly. Each course cost approximately £7000 to set up and during the implementation of the new software, the airline was conducting multiple courses per day for several months. The introduction of the Assima Suite means that in excess of £630,000 has been saved and savings are continued to be made each time a course is run.

Training courses shortened by 30%

The Flight Management courses historically took 3 days to complete. The ease of use and intuitiveness of the Assima Suite has allowed the same course to be delivered much more quickly in just 2 days, therefore shortening the training time by a third.

Positive feedback by end-users

The airline has received excellent feedback from its end-users regarding the training software. In particular, users noted how user-friendly the lessons are and how much easier it now is to understand and explain the complex processes. Previously, trainees often became frustrated when they could not log on to the training flights due to system outages but the reliability of the training clones from Assima has made it much easier for them to do their job efficiently.

Use of Assima software in other projects

Following on from the feedback and success, the airline has decided to work with Assima directly on additional projects. A dedicated consultant from Assima was deployed to create content on four other projects and acts as their ongoing primary contact as the airline continues to develop training with the tool themselves. To date, 9 modules for Flight Management (FMU) training which is used for Business As Usual training have been created, 10 for Business Continuity Plan (BCP) replicating their Altea JFE system and there is also an ongoing process of updating the acceptance and boarding modules.