News

New whitepaper available: Complaint Management

Complaint management is an important part of Customer Relationship Management in any industry. The eControl complaint management is a software module of the system, which is seamlessly integrated into the eControl system infrastructure. The work-based handling of complaints is significantly simplified through the use of eControl infrastructure.

System standards such as statistical analyses, email alerts, text modules, form letters or data management compliant with auditing requirements are also available for complaint management. eControl supports both central and decentralised handling of complaints as well as a mixture of both approaches.

A complaint is often an indicator for a product or service fault and therefore valuable information for process management. Depending on the individual complaints, this information can be downstreamed through module integration for example or also used by safety, security or environment management.

The whitepaper is available as a download in the documents section.

New handbook available: Violation Management

eControl Violation Management focuses on the improvement of the process level through a systematic analysis of violations and the development of effective preventive measures.

The software module enables the verification of a functioning violation management in the system. It comprises documentation, an appeal procedure, the automated management of points accounts, the exceeding of threshold values, the imposition of consequences and the entry of reduction measures.

Violation management is flexibly parameterisable and enables the implementation of as many operational agreements as desired.

Mobile data capture, numerous background services, communication services, automated entries, etc. accelerate and simplify the activities in the field of operational violation management.

A detailed documentation of the module Violation Management is available immediately as a download in the documents section.

Wildlife strike hazard reduction & habitat management

The success of "wildlife strike hazard reduction" measures can be measured in different ways – most simply by the long-term trend in the bird strike rate.

The improvement in the bird strike rate is a reflection of a successful habitat management by the bird strike representative.

Until now the airports have concentrated on area 1 (usually "Landing 200-0 ft., aerodrome and take off 0 – 500ft"), in which wildlife strikes are assigned to the area of responsibility of the airport.

A more detailed definition of the outdoor habitat is given in EU Regulation No. 139/2014 and the remarks relating to ADR.OPS.B.20 wildlife strike hazard reduction.

For many airports the classification of habitats involves additional inspection costs.

The bird strike representative will focus his efforts on the habitats that

a) are relevant for the wildlife strike hazard because of the position of departure and arrival corridors

and

b) in some way provide other starting points for an active habitat management.

There can therefore be different habitats within a radius of 7 NM.

Essentially the aerodrome must specify a procedure for the inspection and evaluation of these habitats, which provides sufficient data quality at a minimal cost. The point-stop method used to measure relative frequency indices is a scientifically recognised and cost-effective procedure.

The point-stop method provides for the inspection of a measurement path, the capture of observations, transfer into a suitable database and subsequent statistical analysis, all of which cost money. Money can potentially be saved by the use of mobile terminals for the counting and classification of species along the measuring paths monitored.

"eControl mobile" provides a touchscreen-optimised user interface specially developed for the purpose of the digital mapping and fully-automatic transfer of data into a database system. The subsequent evaluation and ongoing calculation of indicators such as bird strike rates and frequency indices can occur (semi-)automatically.

EASA 376/2014 Opportunity or burden?

The EU (Regulation) 376/2014 is another regulation which has been imposed on those involved in civil aviation and thereby the airports. With the regulation safety-related incidents are to be reported to the national authorities on a larger scale and in a certain format than was the case before 15.11.2015, simplifying the standardised processing of notifications.

The monitoring and analysis of safety-related incidents are not only rooted in the EU (Regulation) 139/2014 or in ICAO Annex 14 – every process manager must in any case be focussed on the accurate processing of this data.

Depending on the organisational level, this processing can be done using paper, spreadsheets or a professional SMS software product. Irrespective of the type of processing classifications must be made – which incidents belong together in terms of content? How can information be classified to enable meaningful statistical processing?

The ADREP classification system of ICAO Annex 13 has been used since 1976 to store safety-related events. The so-called ADREP taxonomy includes a multitude of classifications, which are high quality, applicable and comprehensive. It is welcome that the EASA has taken over a part of this taxonomy as RIT or Reduced Interface Taxonomy. This taxonomy shall apply if data is being transferred digitally as zipped XML files or in E5X format to the national authorities. Closer examination of these approximately 110 value ranges reveals that these are well documented and alleviates the classification of incidents for every process manager!

This relieves organisations of the time-consuming work of analysing their own empirical data, in order to provide useful classifications. The taxonomy is continuously developed by the ICAO and the EASA – the relevant update is published free of charge. These updates are of course done in such a way that the interpretability of existing databases is not affected – by no means a given compared to other database systems. If these classifications are used internally, notification 376/2014 can virtually be generated at the touch of a button and notified automatically in E5X format. The platform for a data exchange with organisations is also almost given as a by-product.

In summary the EU (Regulation) 376/2014 not only gently leads us as software providers but also every organisation on a positive path of compatibility and is therefore undoubtedly an opportunity rather than a burden!

Wildlife safety: Outdoor habitats

From version 4.4. onwards, the software module Bird Control supports the systematic monitoring of outdoor habitats. The functional extension is available to our customers as part of the software maintenance agreement without licensing costs.

Technically, this functional extension can be traced back to a recommendation by the DAVVL (German Committee for the Prevention of Bird Strikes). Outdoor habitats are also taken into account, for example in EU Regulation No. 139/2014.

In GM2 ADR.OPS.B.020 Wildlife strike hazard reduction, a radius of 7 NM is proposed around the airport reference point.

Depending on the particular environment of an airport, different habitats come under consideration, which impact on the risk of a collision with wildlife.

The individual characteristics of each habitat and different possibilities of influencing the occurrence and behaviour of any wildlife, require a discreet observation of individual habitats.

An airport with different outdoor habitats is shown below by way of example:

The report generators of the statistics module have been expanded by the "map" criterion, with which the desired habitat can be selected. In this way the statistics can be specifically used for the habitat management of an outdoor habitat. If the outline map is selected, all available measuring points can also be analysed irrespective of the habitat.