March 2021
Open Aviation Strategic Engineering System (OASES) allows airlines, fixed wing and helicopter operators, MROs, and CAMOs to join their teams together from frontline engineers to warehouse and stock management staff. As a cloud-based web system OASES is now viewed as the platform for driving and monitoring all MRO operations throughout the industry. Patrick Cust, CEO Patrick Cusk, CEO of Commsoft/OASES explains its success and development.
OASES was designed by and for engineers, can you explain how this occurred and what key elements did the system have to include or were requested?
We developed OASES over many years in collaboration with our users to provide their required functionality. In 2021, for example after consultation with several our customers we added modules for structural damage and repair management, and a shipping and resource planning module.
Given the impact of COVID-19 to the aviation industry has this impacted any developments for the system and how are you preparing for the anticipated rush when airlines return to widespread service?
Our development pipeline is constantly under review and we took the opportunity to accelerate our technology renewal strategy during 2020.
Already in 2021, we are seeing an increase in user requests although we’re experiencing some impact from Brexit on UK companies and those importing and exporting between the UK and EU. As a direct result we’re about to release a new OASES feature to enable customers to capture and audit customs data for imports and exports.
Can you explain how the dedicated help desk operates, and what is the process once a customer asks for help?
The OASES service desk runs 24/7/365 and is used to ask questions, to request services, to report issues or suggest improvements.
It’s monitored by the service team around 15 hours a day Mon-Fri with “Out of Hours” Monitoring for Business Critical/P1 issues.
The technologies we use is industry recognised and are accepted tools of the trade, namely Atlassian JIRA Service Desk & Confluence, TeamSupport, and PagerDuty. In addition, OASES service desk also integrates with our software development and business development tools and processes for improved service.
Most tickets raised by our users are answered by the service team and where necessary they are triaged to subject matter experts. This ensures that every issue is resolved in the most timely and efficient manner possible.
Every one of our 130+ customers is added to the Help Desk as part of their OASES implementation and they can have one or as many accounts as they see fit.
For added efficiency gains in 2021 we are looking to implement Tier 0 Support tools.
How has the introduction of the ‘private cloud’ been received by customers, is there further growth in this area for OASES?
OASES Private cloud means that our customers don’t have to worry about commissioning and managing their own servers or worrying about data backups. Additionally, they can access the system worldwide, not just at the same location their server is located.
We are currently undertaking major work in this area and launching “OASES Cloud” backed by AWS which brings even better availability and redundancy than the current OASES private cloud. OASES Cloud facilitates evergreen continuously deployed versions of all our platforms – desktop, web and mobile – straight to our customers’ fingertips. This means that our customers always have the latest version of each of the platforms in terms of features and bug fixes updated nightly.
You offer a software tailoring system for airlines; can you explain how this works and what makes it different from similar systems?
Customer success is a central tenet of our philosophy. We host an ideas portal for each of our platforms where customers can create, share, and vote on ideas for features to be added to the OASES roadmap. It is this mantra of agility and continuous improvement and delivery of the product that sets us apart from other systems.
