Aerial Toolbox are based at the Rangiora Airfield and offer a range of commercial, agricultural and transport IT solutions.
They approached Digital Fusion with the key objective being to save data entry time, currently being consumed with the re-entering of paper daily flight records (DFR's) into spreadsheets.
Moving to an electronic workflow (in other words, capturing the forms directly on iPads in the aircraft) would save time in itself, but will also mean there’s less chance of error and that it’s easier for different people to do the process. The desire was to also have a centralised collection of data from which they can draw other information, reports and track the business relationship with clients.
WHAT WE DID
After some careful design and analysis of requirements we have designed two fully integrated solutions, one being the FileMaker Go application being used on the iPads, the other is using FileMaker Pro as a management tool in the office.
For the iPads we have created a standalone database that allows the pilot to enter the data, something previously done on paper/forms. When the pilot is back at base or at some prescribed point in time when connectivity is available, the iPad syncs back to the office system.
For the office we have used our Nutshell CRM as the basis of the office solution. This provides a great framework: as standard it provided them with a client & contacts database plus invoicing and the basic links to Xero.
On top of Nutshell we have added in all the data structures — screens and fields etc — that will be needed for the DFR information, and functionality to calculate and format the invoices from that data.
And to show you how special this project has been, FileMaker have featured it in their newsletter and on their website, read it here