How increasing your digital footprint will help your organization take flight.
Every innovative and successful business around the globe focuses on harnessing potential and maximizing efficiencies for sustainable differentiation and business growth. In the competitive and complex world of commercial aviation, this is the priority, along with safety, compliance and customer satisfaction. But can your organization truly tip the scales when it comes to driving innovation and revolutionizing business? Absolutely.
Leveraging advancing technologies and honing and optimizing high-yield processes will not only help you benefit from profitable growth but will also help you to carve the future landscape for commercial aviation. The key is to tackle industry challenges and trends with a digital strategy that gives you the ability to not just adjust to change…but drive it. So, buckle up and see what’s on the horizon for your organization when it comes to digital transformation.
Pre-flight checks
According to Accenture Consulting, digitalization is expected to create up to $305 billion in value for the aviation industry through increased profitability. So what are the challenges driving the push for digitalization and hindering it at the same time?
- Longer, more complex aircraft programs
According to Air Transport World, “Maintenance is shifting to larger, longer-term deals, frequently flight-hour support, in which providers bear reliability and cost risks. Smart use of data and technology can secure growing shares of aftermarkets. But overconfident bids could make winning any deals costly.” - An aging workforce and small talent pool
IFS research, in conjunction with Raconteur, reports that 41% of airlines experiencing a talent deficit confirm that it’s restricting their ability to perform, saying they feel either slightly or totally unprepared to deal with the challenge. - A growing demand on airlines (passenger growth forecasted at 6+% over the next few years)
Yet 67% of airlines report that operational availability is already a significant challenge for their business. - Big data (aircraft are now generating and reporting more data than ever before)
Given every long-haul flight captures on average 500GB of black-box data, the fact is that commercial aviation has never had the opportunity to leverage so much data-driven insight, but what data matters?
Reaching altitude
How can you harness the potential of the digital transformation to handle powerful market forces while leveraging disruptive technologies? According to IFS’s research, the following five technologies were identified as investment areas with the potential to support meeting these challenges:
- Internet of Things (IoT) – 39%
- Big Data and Analytics – 39%
- Artificial Intelligence – 37%
- Enterprise Resource Planning – 33%
- Mobile Computing/Applications – 31%
A digital strategy that balances investment in the above technologies and follows an enterprise-wide operational excellence strategy will help reduce unplanned downtime, increase fleet optimization, reduce costs and deliver a value-added customer experience.
Safe landing
Digitalization will transform the travel experience, enable a more efficient and systematic travel ecosystem, render core operational processes more flexible and adaptable and increase safety and security measures. But legacy systems will significantly impede organizations looking to change their approach to the digital frontier. Aviation organizations looking to embrace digital change must adopt technologies that will grow with them, supporting global expansion, new business models and process changes. Automation and optimization of core business processes and clear leadership will allow your organization to more effectively make the transition to a digital world.
What’s next on the horizon
Those who succeed in the commercial aviation sector are those who successfully re-invent themselves and reposition their business model as a digitally-transformed, data-informed and asset-focused organization.
IFS’s purpose-built aviation software is built with over 30 years of industry expertise and designed to help aviation organizations embrace digital change. Find out how your peers are approaching digital transformation and how industry experts can guide your digital journey in this informative eBook, Driving efficiency in a changing world of aviation.
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