Air Astana adopts Vistair's DocuNet
Air Astana, incorporated in 2001, today employs more than 3,500 people and operates a fleet of 26 Western aircraft across close to 60 domestic and international routes.
The rapidly-expanding airline recently placed an order for purchasing Boeing 787, Boeing 767, Airbus A320 and Embraer 190 family aircraft that will further expand the fleet up to 34 aircraft by 2016 and 43 aircraft by 2020.
To match this ambitious growth plan Air Astana, which maintains its fleet to audited EU EASA 145 standards, decided to also upgrade its operational capabilities and, following a review, concluded that outsourcing its document management processes was the way forward.
“The previous Flight Operations document storage used by our Airline was a non-scalable solution with lack of flexibility in regards to items tracking,” said Anastassiya Maximova, manager business support at Air Astana. “We always relied on revisions on our intranet and other internal communication channels in order to try to track the who, how and when.”
“We knew that, as a modern and progressive airline with a global reach, we had to be more methodical in how we stored, analysed and distributed our flight operations documents.”
After reviewing the leading providers of documentation storage and distribution for the airline industry and consulting their aviation peers Air Astana chose Vistair’s market-leading DocuNet system.
DocuNet allows airlines to deliver up to date and fully compliant electronic flight operations manuals throughout their organisation. Vistair continually works on improving and perfecting the service and supporting technologies to manage the complete manual lifecycle.
As a result customers have a fully hyperlinked and indexed library of manuals delivered to all required platforms, accurately and on time.
“We have been extremely impressed with not only the quality of the service we receive from Vistair, but also the cost,” Marat Sekerbekov, director flight operations support at Air Astana. “We based a lot of our decision to go with Vistair on the opinions of others within the airline industry and I’m pleased to say the solution has exceeded our expectations,” he added.
In addition to deploying the DocuNet solution, Air Astana has also started using another airline-specific software product, the CrewNet communications portal.
Developed alongside airline professionals themselves, CrewNet is an innovative yet simple to use notices portal, which dramatically improves communication management within airlines and drastically reduces the time it takes to manage notices.
“We only recently deployed CrewNet and the benefits were immediate,” continued Marat Sekerbekov. “It is so simple to use and very effective for our needs.
“Overall our experience with Vistair has been extremely positive and, as a business, they are exactly the kind of partner we need in order to grow our business over the next few years.
“We’re very ambitious at Air Astana and Vistair has proved it can help us achieve our goals by giving us everything we have asked of them and more.”
