Ascend Aviation: Paperless FileMaker Mobile Application

Challenge:

Ascend Aviation provides charter flight services for Ascend Performance Materials employees and business associates. Necessary manual paper forms to record flight and travel details, and expenses became excessive, messy, and untraceable, causing a disconnect between passengers and crew, and crew and accounting.

Solution:

We worked with Brian, one of Ascend Aviation’s pilots, to extend the capabilities of his home-grown FileMaker Pro solution – a definite step in the right direction to streamlining their accounting and information management processes. Expanding on the capabilities of his existing FileMaker Pro solution, we tackled some of the more complex issues – let’s make it a FileMaker GO mobile application!

For most of us, when we travel by air, two very important factors in choosing an itinerary – other than price and date – are the departure and arrival times. Even before we get on the plane ticket in hand, we know what those two numbers are – or should be! Once boarded, we may hear that we’ll be arriving ahead of schedule by a pretty precise number of minutes…WOOHOO, gotta love that! …assuming we’re heading somewhere fun.

For obvious reasons, these times and minutes are even more important to pilots and air traffic controllers. With the enhanced FileMaker Pro database, the flight time estimations based not only on the speed of the plane and head- or tailwinds, but also daylight saving time rules around the world, are now calculated.

Today, not only do Ascend’s planes head for the skies, but their flight detail and expense information has found a new home in the cloud. With a complete rewrite of the FileMaker mobile app to add support to run on FileMaker mobile supported devices, we enabled the pilots and crew to have real time access to needed flight information including passenger itineraries, dietary restrictions, and flight logs. Within a few seconds they can download reports in the air, remotely from the ground on any mobile enabled device, or from their desktops.

Result:

The FileMaker Pro solution ultimately eliminated paperwork. Information is now available from anywhere, in real time, and presented in the same format on all devices and screens, in turn getting rid of inconsistencies, improving information accuracy, overall efficiency and passenger satisfaction, and establishing seamless communication between crew and accounting.