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Case study: ELMS

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Client

ELMS

Country or Region

Europe and beyond

Industry

Aviation

elms-aviation
A start up organisation seeking to offer the market a ground breaking software solution to support the revolutionary new set of rules that will police the way the entire Airline industry visualises engineering competency and can track the work record of critical engineering tasks – the Electronic Logbook Management System (ELMS).

Business situation

Upcoming changes being introduced by the Airline Industry Regulator needed to be built into a market leading software product that would be available the moment the changes were announced. Thus creating the only available full functionality solution on the market.

  • The primary concerns for the industry included:
  • An increase in maintenance errors and resulting incidents
  • The free movement of labour and lack of visibility of native training and qualification systems
  • Fraudulent training and qualification records
  • The introduction of new technologies and materials
  • Global fleet growth and pressure on resources as fewer apprentices are trained and experienced engineers near retirement or leave the sector


The period for the initial development was very short and exacerbated by the need to have a demonstration version of the solution available for a major industry conference part way through the development timeline.

The challenge

“I needed a software development partner that could take a set of evolving requirements; still incomplete and unknown, and build a solution that was immediately available once the regulator had announced the changes. These changes would radically change the industry and our product had to be ready the instant that changes were announced.”

Marshall Barrand, Director ELMS Global Solutions Limited

Solution

ELMS engaged Igale to utilise their Agile development methodology to build a bespoke Microsoft solution SPA application based on the .NET tech stack and Angular framework. The solution would encapsulate the key regulatory changes and be market ready to be offered as a full-function solution to both engineering companies and individual engineers.

ELMS is hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud service, uses SQL server databases and load balanced web-servers with dual site redundancy. The envisaged solution would allow organisations involved in aircraft maintenance and engineering activities to make safety critical decisions and evaluate and manage personnel competence based on accurate, real-time data.

The solution would need to encompass a set of competence criteria that would be used to provide accurate evaluations of competence in accordance with the EASA part 145, part 66, part 21 and part M regulations.

The application would also allow users to build a secure record of their training, qualifications and validated task based experience, content that could then be shared with current or potential employers.

To overcome the challenge of the industry conference, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was delivered that would showcase the solution pre-release. Whilst not fully functioning in all areas, the MVP enabled the product to be demonstrated to over 200 organisations by a team of ELMS engineers.

  • The ELMS application addressed the industry concerns by providing a practical and effective tool to:
  • Carry out instant, risk based oversight and competence audits of personnel
  • Conduct assessments of competence and experience prior to employment
  • Monitor third party contractor competence and validated experience record
  • Access associated users training and qualification records
  • Enhance organisational safety culture
  • Identify training requirements and competence gaps


The major challenge with this project however was that the complete solution needed to be designed, built and tested in parallel with the evolving details of the aforementioned regulatory changes.

Project outcomes

Delivery of the solution in the required timescales, in an incredibly collaborative and supportive way, enabling the application to be re-engineered in several key areas as requirements changed. Consistent visibility of the product with changes ready to deploy within a sprint, and on occasions within the day.

ELMS now has an enterprise grade solution that they supply to major clients in the aviation industry that is robust, reliable, performant and scalable.

Client feedback

“The previous software company we used failed to deliver anything solid after nearly 18 months of work. Within eight sprints of their Agile approach, Igale had not only built a framework to surround and capture the core requirements but had built a facility that enabled us to prototype and work with the members of our (large) advisory board and the industry regulator to draw out, hone and build the evolving components of the product.

“We knew that changes were to be made right up to the go-live, but as it turned out even the branding, look and feel, target platform and some of the key transactional workflows were all up in the air for large periods of time during the build. Despite all this uncertainty, Igale managed to rapidly embrace the industry, one which is embroidered with ambiguity and interpretation and drive the development forward. Most impressively and importantly, they managed to do this in a calm and controlled manner even when a plethora of new people and partner organisations were continually added to the head count of the start-up company.”

Marshall Barrand, Director ELMS Global Solutions Limited

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