Digital Solutions to Facilitate the Employees’ Work
Air Canada
Overview
A Few Statistics About Air Canada
Air Canada is one of the top 20 biggest airline companies in the world, counting more than 30 000 employees, 390 planes and 48 million clients each year.
Mandate
As Air Canada’s partner for digital projects destined to its employees and clients for several years, nventive’s goal was to create the necessary digital solutions for smooth business operations, process optimization, and regulation compliance.
Realizations
- Understanding business rules
- Regulation logic tree structure
- User research
- User experience
- User interface
- Front-end development
- Back-end development
- Optimization and support
Technologies
- Front-end development: Angular
- Back-end development: ASP.Net Core API, Azure SQL database
Collaborate to Create
nventive has truly become an extension of Air Canada’s team, commonly called ‘‘Managed Delivery Team’’. The team was created according to specific needs and managed in an agile manner to deliver quality solutions throughout the partnership, while also being integrated in Air Canada’s Azure development and operations (DevOps) organization.
But there’s more: when it comes to user experience and user interface, our design teams merged with Air Canada’s team. By regularly going to Air Canada’s offices to participate in workshops, design thinking initiation sessions, and user tests, our team achieved a good understanding of the different users’ needs. From offices to warehouses, through departure gates, it was crucial to understand the reality of each staff member and their occupation to offer solutions adapted to their needs.
The Developed Digital Solutions
Strengthen the Company-Employee Relation and Automize Processes
Air Canada Life, the first app we developed for Air Canada, is a business-to-employee (B2E) mobile app that allows Air Canada staff to easily book standby flights depending on real-time seat availability.
This self-serve platform has several major benefits: it enables personnel members to remain independent until the last minute and to simplify their search process.
The app’s most recent version also features a chat centre where Air Canada can share company and industry-related news with its employees.
Apart from being useful, this functionality is also an excellent communication channel between the company and its staff members.
Centralize Information to Better Process It
Air Canada Reliability, the second project on which nventive worked, is a customized Web app that enables information transmission between the maintenance personnel and the engineering team.
Before the solution existed, each role (pilots, engineers, mechanics) had a different tool to catalogue their diverse needs. The goal was to centralize and simplify the whole process.
As a result, this Web tool guarantees that the information collected by maintenance and crew staff members is immediately accessible for the engineering personnel. This way, the team can analyze, find, and resolve issues.
Meeting Simultaneously the Employees’ and the Clients’ Needs
When the C49 law passed, Air Canada attended to the development of a tool destined to passengers and airport agents that facilitated flight compensation requests. But this tool is also a necessity for customer service and finance teams, who use it to create reports and analyze data.
To consider every possible scenario, our experts worked closely with Air Canada to create the tree structure for Canadian and international regulations, while also taking into account business rules.
Thanks to this unique digital solution, passengers and flight attendants have access to a simple and intuitive tool suited to their needs, while the customer service and finance teams can visualize all the necessary information to work efficiently.
Main Challenges We Overcame
Understanding the Needs of Different Types of Users
Creating digital products destined to employees has a very different approach than projects for consumers.
We must carefully identify both the employees’ and the company’s needs in order to align them in a single digital solution.
Indeed, the volume of shared information is often very dense. The challenge consists of including all this information in a single screen framework. This is where the importance of user experience and user interface comes into play: it allows users to consume all the necessary information in a fluid and optimal manner.
For these numerous projects, our teams went on site to better understand each stakeholder’s needs: engineers, mechanics, pilots, flight attendants, etc.
Structuring Complexity
Like it may often be the case in projects related to a company’s internal and external structures, our teams faced the following challenges:
The complexity of business rules: to build an efficient digital solution, the plurality of stakeholders, the different regulations and the internal processes’ ambiguity need to be untangled. That’s when creating a tree structure becomes crucial: it allows us to note every condition, to then be able to enter them into a precise product backlog for our team of developers. Business continuity: in the case of Air Canada Reliability, the teams needed to be able to continue using the previous systems, while progressively migrating to the new digital solution.
Of course, before creating different digital solutions, it was fundamental to take the necessary time for user research, but also to build the user experience and interface.
Results
Feedback from employees is highly positive with this new app, and our collaboration with Air Canada is ongoing.
