Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd.

Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd.

Virgin Atlantic Takes Flight: ‘Safety Underpins Everything We Do’

Virgin Atlantic is a global airline based in the UK. It has approximately 6,700 employees and flies to more than 30 destinations in 18 countries.

Summary

When Virgin Atlantic launched in 1984, it took the airline industry by storm with an emphasis on exceptional service and fun destinations. The cheeky innovator was over the top, a self-described “tiny airline” up against much bigger and well-established players like American, Eastern and British Airlines (BA).

Despite its playful personality, Virgin Atlantic has always been serious about the safety of its employees and passengers, the management of risk, customer comfort and satisfaction, sustainability and corporate resiliency.

In 2021, a year of great challenges and opportunities for the airline and transportation and logistics industries, Virgin Atlantic realized it needed a more robust, simple-yet-smart technology that would aid in achieving its safety management goals. Virgin Atlantic had been using Intelex for a number of years, utilizing custom-made forms that were no longer able to scale to meet current requirements, including many internal and external reporting requirements. The airline also needed a system that gave it and its leadership teams the right visibility into different parts of the business but wasn’t a burden on its users as they entered, analyzed and viewed data.

Intelex Solution

Virgin Atlantic was able to leverage the flexibility of the Intelex system and have a single source of truth that fit many of the airline’s needs. As a robust application, Intelex provides the airline with off-the-shelf functionality as well as customization capabilities that meet its specific needs within the aviation industry.

For example, Virgin Atlantic teams created an “Aircraft Damage” report, which asks specific questions around the event type and includes built-in business rule thresholds. Those thresholds allow the system to automatically close reports deemed “low priority” with a risk rating and a classification and provide feedback to the person making the report. Higher priority reports, however, are tagged for a more detailed review.

Intelex Applications

Outcome

The flexibility and customization capabilities of Intelex has helped Virgin Atlantic teams to have better management of data input/output with the automation of many of its processes of capturing, monitoring, and analyzing useful and meaningful EHS data.

Further, it has aided the airline in not only providing better visibility for its leadership teams, but also to have a better regulatory process and standardizations. The integration of some of its current systems has also helped overcome working in siloes.