Virginia-based international intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) provider MAG Aerospace has used Centrik to consolidate the operational management of its 20 separate specialist aviation programmes, a move that has revolutionised the way the company operates.

As a rapidly growing business, MAG Aerospace was originally looking for a safety management system (SMS) to oversee its increasingly complex flight requirements. However, after a demonstration of Centrik's overarching capabilities, the company decided to use the system to make a step change across its entire operational management approach.

MAG Aerospace programme manager Wes Davison says: “It's true that we were initially only looking for an SMS, but it was obvious from our first look at Centrik that it had the power to do so much more; it has genuinely given us a platform to change our entire operation in such a way that it will help the business grow even further.”

MAG Aerospace operates more than 200 manned and unmanned special mission aircraft for federal, international, civilian and commercial customers around the world. It delivers around 100,000 flight hours a year across six continents, with its 20 individual programmes operating everything from hand-held UAVs through to helicopters and F-18s.

Previously, each programme had its own operational management processes, predominantly through paper filing, email chains and spreadsheets, with no ability for pertinent information to be shared between them. This disconnect meant disparate levels of oversight, making audits or simply implementing company-wide changes a complex and time-consuming administrative task.

With Centrik, everything from flight information, document control, risk and safety reporting to training logs and personnel records are now easily accessible across every programme via a centralised dashboard available to users anywhere in the world.

Centrik provides MAG Aerospace's senior management team with a complete overview of company operations, but the flexibility of the system means that around 600 crew, including pilots, sensor operators, technicians, and anyone working on domestic or overseas programmes, also have a level of access. This allows them to record, share, update and action information either directly into the system when online, or out in the field via its offline automatic synchronisation functionality.

The company can now quickly and easily perform oversight across its entire operation, analysing constantly updated performance metrics across all programmes, visually illustrating the results via Centrik's intuitive heatmapping software. Analysis of this information helps the company make astute business decisions, allowing it to easily see where improvements can be made in relation to the likes of safety, risk, compliance or training.

“We are a business, so having the ability to quickly show potential customers our safety and compliance records gives us a huge advantage,” adds Davison. “Being able to evidence such a spectrum of information will also help us to reduce our insurance rates, both domestically and internationally, which will of course save significant amounts of money. Coupled with the reduction in labour costs, thanks to having to do significantly less administration, and Centrik will very soon pay for itself.”