Case study: Streamlining policy management in a highly regulated global aviation industry

Have you ever wondered what keeps the complex machinery of global aviation services ticking? Mark Rockett, the Group IT Manager at Gama Aviation, provides us with an exclusive look under the hood of this multifaceted industry.

From the challenges of unifying IT systems across continents to ensuring strict adherence to regulations, Mark's deep dive into the intricacies of policy management and cloud-based solutions is nothing short of riveting. He paints a clear picture of an industry where every document and policy must be meticulously managed to ensure safety and compliance.

Mark also discusses the intricacies involved and the rationale in transitioning to a centralised cloud-based system using Xoralia, a pivotal tool that ensures seamless policy management and compliance. Discover how Xoralia not only supports but also enhances Gama's ability to maintain airworthiness and manage operations efficiently.

Whether you're an IT professional, work in aviation, or are simply fascinated by how large companies streamline their processes, this episode provides a compelling look at the critical role of advanced policy management systems in maintaining the safety and efficiency of global aviation operations.

If this resonates with you, do get in touch with a member of our team at https://xoralia.com/contact/. We understand that policy management can be challenging especially in highly regulated industries and we're here to help.

You can also visit our website https://xoralia.com/ to learn more about Xoralia. 

Transcript

I'm Mark Rockett. I'm Group IT Manager at Gama Aviation. We're a global aviation services company. We cover pretty much everything in business aviation, I would say. We can fly people places, we repair the aircraft, we have software companies within our group, and we continue to be an airworthiness company. We’re spread right across the spectrum of business aviation. We have locations in the UK, Middle East, Asia and a lot of locations in the US. 

We were really looking for one central system as we had multiple different systems across different parts of our business. So, a lot of aviation is all based on regulation. So, we had different regulations and different operating systems for different parts of our business. We have even in different countries and different regions and they'd have different systems. So, we got to the point where we were starting to try and move away from two or three on-premise systems and different parts of the business running different systems to one central repository for all of our policies and procedures. 

Our main system was an on-premise system. We wanted to move away from that. Our strategy is to move to the cloud, a big Microsoft 365 house. So the idea was always to move it to SharePoint. But we obviously decided we needed some kind of overlay on top of that, but the main driver for it was to try and unify it across all of our group companies to one system that was easy for everybody to use and everybody had the same user experience we had somewhere. 

We were always getting questions from business units about how we meant to push this policy out or how we meant to know if we've got one, because if they had an aviation one within our group, a flying policy that may come from one system and then from our ground operation systems for maintenance, they'd get another system and then it's which one to HR use, which one to IT use. So it was just becoming a lot to manage across five or six different systems. Yeah, we just wanted to bring it all into one place.

That was one of the major issues that we had to cover off was not only do we need the end user to be able to attest they've read the policy and normally that's annually we also needed the actual document owners to be able to do the same. They needed to be able to constantly review these documents. We have legal requirements for them to be signed off once a year. As well as being read once a year, they need to be reviewed and signed off that they are still current and correct. So that was one of our other scenarios that we had to take into account. As well as getting the end user to attest them, we had to actually make sure that there was a process in place to make sure that the document owners were being reminded that they had to do that and then attest that they had actually updated that policy or at least reviewed it, and it was still current.

With the amount of documents that we have for all of our different accreditations that we hold, there was a definite need for us to have a departmental resource in their systems that could manage all the documents, as well as having the document owners who actually manage the content of the documents and making sure that that content is reviewed. We ended up having to have three parties on all of our policies. We had to have the department that were in charge of the librarians almost that were actually in charge of the documents, then the owners of the documents themselves that were reviewing them, and then the end users that were actually going to have to read and attest to them. 

We were even doing it in Teams before where they'd have three or four folders but they'd get complicated with. Someone would move one into the wrong folder or they'd have multiple copies of it. It was just becoming a bit of a mess for us across a number of different ways that they tried to implement it. We had a couple of systems, except before we had two or three systems that had bolt-ons to it. That was a document management solution for that particular system, but that became too much. If you had a quality department, for example, they might have to work across five systems and it was almost always, they spent half their time, going, “What system is that one in? Oh, that one's got that link from that one” or whatever else. They couldn't just go back to a backend repository and repository and say, “Oh, look, there's all the documents that we need to check” and see it all from there. So it does become very, it can become very complicated.

We considered a few bespoke aviation tools. We looked at whether we could encompass all of our policy management into one of our other programs was proven to be difficult. We did recently introduce an intranet at the time, so took a decision that we wanted to make it a key part of the intranet somewhere where people would one drive more traffic to the intranet but also, conversely, we have a lot of traffic to our intranet anyway, so everyone's there. So, it makes sense to put it into that, and that kind of led us to it needed to be a SharePoint or a SharePoint-based system. So, before we were a big Microsoft house, we wanted to make sure that everything was via Microsoft already for other things, and then we came up against the same problems. 

We've noticed there, the biggest things were reporting. We had to report on who was reading the policies and who was complying with them. A lot of big part of aviation is auditing and compliance, and so internally there's a lot of compliance. Aviation is auditing and compliance, and so internally there's a lot of compliance. But then we also have to be able to show our regulators CAA, similar that you know we are doing these things and the system is one, that the systems fit for purpose, but also that the users are compliant and they are reading them. We have to actually run them through the whole process of the system and show them that it's working, and the biggest thing they want to see at the end of it is the reports that show who is reading these documents and how are they getting the notifications.

We wanted the notifications part to be driven by our internet. So we wanted to use the Microsoft pop-ups that come within SharePoint so that we could show when someone logs onto the internet, they could see it there. We were trying to drive traffic away from email. We do have email notifications as well to ease that, but we wanted both parts.

So I think there's a bit driven by some of the business units where they said, “Come on, everyone's used to getting an email”. And then there's another half of the company that says, “Enough with email, we don't want any more email, we can't cope with more email, let's get rid of email”. And so we kind of covered off avenues there as well. 

With regards to SharePoint, the ultimate decision was that we wanted to put SharePoint through the back end, but we needed an add-in. So we looked at a number of different add-ons and then we went with Xoralia in the end. It made a lot of sense to try and have an app to run all of the difficult bits. In the end we didn't want to try and write these things ourselves. We're looking at an add-in that would do it and that kind of pushed us to you guys and Xoralia.