Protecting lives—at dizzying heights
Look around you; business opportunities are everywhere. Even in the most uncommon, the most unimaginable, niche areas. Like manufacturing airplane seats, for instance. We’ve flown all over the world but never wondered who made the seats or the seat belts that protect our lives.
Avianor does that. Based in Quebec City, Avianor is a commercial aircraft cabin integration company. From manufacturing, certification, and packaging to integration and refurbishment of seats and cabinets, Avianor handles it all.
With so many moving parts, so many graphs, and so many mathematical calculations floating around, Avianor had an obvious problem. A pretty big one at that, too.
The manufacturing team on the floor followed a certain design. And when the engineers made geometric changes, even just for the sake of aesthetics—the shape of a bracket, for instance—the manufacturing team didn't know about it. They followed the original design and ended up with a whole lot of seats that won’t seat anyone.
"Nobody's aware of the change because they’re following a specific document that they think is the right document."
Precisely. That’s when they realized they needed a system to improve communications across all the teams in the company.
So they built their own system with Zoho Creator. Now when they revise one document, the production teams receive an email notifying them about the changes. And to keep things clean, the old document is removed from the system — just to make sure the production team gets it right.
On another level, the engineering team uses a Zoho Creator application to keep up with their internal tasks. The draftsmen plan the design, map it out, and update their progress in the application while the project manager oversees their work. Once the manager is satisfied, the design is then transferred to a secondary draftsman who keeps the process running.
"We transferred the Excel sheets we had been using to manage our projects, and implemented them on Zoho Creator."
In addition, Avianor created a custom app to manage their entire warehouse of aircraft parts. They label each component with a QR code. Now all they have to do is scan one component from their smartphone and they can see details like where the component is from, where it should be stored, and where it’s headed next.
To manage all the components in easy batches, Avianor also built a dashboard that categorizes stocks and their availability.
“Creator gives us great flexibility, and improves our efficiency and the engagement between our teams. The way Creator influences our company is just magical.”
So on your next flight, when you have your head in the clouds, know that the cloud probably helped build your cabin, too.
Thanks:Mathieu Demers, Avianor Corporation.