This is a transcription from a Veoci webinar, FAA Annual Certification Inspections: Why You Should Digitize, hosted on June 1st, 2022. If you would like to watch the webinar recording, click here.
Dia Wynn 0:05
Good morning or afternoon everyone, my name is Dia Wynn and I’m the General Manager for the Aviation team here at Veoci. And today, we’re going to talk about Veoci and your FAA annual certification inspection. So, I’m going to run through some slides, and then one of our Solution Engineers is going to follow up and give you some practical things about our dashboard. This webinar is being recorded, and it will be sent to you automatically if you’re an attendee. If you have any questions or need help, you can email webinars@veoci.com, or Jeff and I directly and our information will be at the very end. We are also going to be accepting any questions you have, submit them at any time and we will go over them together as a group at the very end of the webinar, and no question is a bad question.
So to start with a little bit of background, again, like I said, my name is Dia Wynn, I’m the General Manager of aviation. I have been in love with aviation since third grade. My third grade teacher was the first female to get her pilot’s license in San Diego. And we took a field trip and ever since then, I’ve been sold. I’ve also worked at SeaTac International Airport and San Francisco International Airport. My last 21 years was at SFO, and I ended my career there as the Operations Manager, overseeing the daily operations. I have participated in over eight annual inspections both as the daily ops component, the airfield inspection component, and seven of those years in the training department overseeing our compliance training efforts. So later on, you’re gonna get to meet Jeff. Jeff is one the Solution Engineers here at Veoci, and he’s worked with the Aviation team for over three years with over 100 of our airport clients, and he has seen all the solutions that they use, and understands how to put those all together in a very nice presentation.
So here’s our agenda for today. First, I’ve just talked about Jeff and I and we’ll talk a little bit about Veoci. We’ll talk about Compliance Theory, methods of sharing data, and then we’ll get into some questions.
Veoci: More than a Part 139 Solution
So most of you know what Veoci is since you’re here, Veoci is an online platform for digitizing your operations. We’re more than a 139 solution, we’re more than a daily operation solution, I’m not going to read you this slide, please, visit veoci.com if you want to see this slide. But what we really are is, we are here to help you manage your pain points, and to streamline your operation, ensure compliance, easily share communication across all different departments, and digitize processes.
So Veoci has over 100 airport clients in which they use over 50 different types of solutions within our system. So the next slide is going to show you a couple of our most popular solutions in the aviation team: citation management, dealer management, compliance, operations, completing daily logs, wildlife, of course, is a big one. And then our airfield inspections and not just for 139 airports, but for any type of airport. Everybody has compliance issues for us even if they didn’t set them themselves, and it doesn’t have to be compliance. So the nice thing about Veoci, the more modules you use or solutions you have integrated together within Veoci, the less time consuming it is to enter data and to share that data, and to pull historical analytics, which is really quite important for airport operators.
Maintaining Compliance, FAA Inspectors and Data Gathering, Oh My!
So very briefly on Compliance Theory. There’s a couple of different ways to go about this, right? Everybody, I don’t know why when you talk to FAA cert inspector people kind of get a little freaked out, right? Like, oh, come on, they’re going to search for records left and right, up and down. And quite honestly, as an airport operator, we’re always in compliance, right? That’s our day to day operations. And if we’re not in compliance on something, I have never had a certification inspector give us a hard time if we can document why we’re not in compliance, what we’re doing to correct it, and how we’ve just disseminated that information. Right. So really, we should always be prepared for an inspection at any given time.
On the other side of that, what information do we share with the FAA? Do we just share what is required by the regulations or do we share more? And an example of that I can give is training records. It’s a very gray area. We can talk for two minutes right now, and technically that’s considered enough. But is that really acceptable to your organization? Probably not. Airports tend to set their own standards that put them at a higher level than just regulatory compliance. So do you share all of that with your cert inspector? Or do you share just the bare bones minimum? So that’s going to be your organizational decision on what information you want to share and how you want to share it. But within Veoci, you can document both of those in the same data set, in the same method, and then pick and choose what you share with your certification inspector. So I don’t want you to think that you just have to have a special solution or special data just for compliance, right? All of your regular compliance for your own organization can be broken down to show just the regulatory.
All right. So there’s lots of different ways that we store and gather our data, for airfield operations. I look at this file folder and it is so true, as most of you know, and it turns out to be in the last week before this inspection when you’re trying to pull everything together, right. So some of the ways that people store their information is it can be collected daily, right through some type of database software: Veoci. You can store data with pictures, you can store data in Excel sheets, you can integrate from another system, some people use different work order systems, and the way that we’re going to show that to you in a little bit is on the saved view tiles of Veoci. But before we go there, I wanted to do a quick poll for everybody. And I wanted to know how your organization currently collects your data. So you should be getting a question. If you could all answer it, that would be fabulous for me.
Okay, so let’s say 33% of us use paper forms pen and paper or you know, you go to the photocopier, you make copies of your daily report and have 1000 copies, and then you just grab one and pencil it in. Excel spreadsheets, yes, that was the pinnacle of our storage at SFO, and then “other”. So I’m guessing that’s going to be some type of other database system that you use. So again, the way that we can store this data within Veoci is we can collect it through daily operations within Veoci. We could take it as attachments, like an attachment of a work order, a picture of a work order, pictures of the corrected work order, pictures of pavement failures. So it can be used as just attachments, you can have a form that you fill out and you just take a picture of that attachment. Or do you have a wildlife form that you use that you have for aircraft and airlines and we just take a picture of that and create a record with an attachment. We can also download information from an integration such as another work order system, such as Digital NOTAMs, such as the FAA Agent Database, to pull information about runway incursions, which could be your surface event that you save. And then we can sort all that information within Veoci into a saved view tile on your dashboard. So I’m going to pass this over to Jeff right now. So he can show you an example of what an FAA Certification dashboard can look like. But remember, this is highly customizable for each of you and the data that you want to share and how you want to share it.
Customize Your Solution to Fit Your Needs (And Your Inspector’s Wants): A Demo
Jeff Venditto 10:35
Okay. Great. All right. So hi, everyone, thanks for attending. My name is Jeff, I’ve been with Veoci for over three years now, working the majority of that time in the Aviation vertical. So I’ve been around, I’ve seen a lot of different solutions. Again, like Dia mentioned, this is just one way to be able to display this information. I’ve seen it done a bunch of ways, it really depends. You know, every inspector is different in how you want to set this up. But the really nice thing about this solution is it’s completely customizable, and can really be put together in the way that you want your inspector to view this information, right, you have complete control of this dashboard.
This can be done a couple of ways. But really, the easiest way to do this is to create a separate space in Veoci, separate side room operational space. And what we can do here is we can invite this inspector in as a guest. So we have the ability to invite them in as a guest and we can define what kind of level of access, we obviously don’t want them going in there clicking around submitting anything, so we can actually give them Observer Access, which is really just a read only access, and just give them access to this specific dashboard we want them to see. In this example, you can see on this dashboard, we have some of our documentation requirements. This is a tile that shows some information, this can be completely customized on what we want them to see. We also have a links tile on the top right side, which can actually link them to different files that we have saved in here. So if I was going to click on one of these links, it’s actually going to bring them to an external download of some additional documentation. And they’re able to see what we want them to see when it comes to what we want them to download with these links.
We also can attach information directly from our Veoci solution, our 139 solution, right into this dashboard. So if we want them to be able to see all of our work orders that are in progress or closed, we’re able to set up that parameter in that filter, they’re able to click on this link and then they’re coming into this link to see a grid view of what we specifically want them to see. So we’re setting these filters in here, from a date range or in progress or close in this example, this is work orders. And we’re giving them access to see the actual entries that we want them to see. So again, completely customizable, but you get to set the parameter on specifically what you want them to see, as far as closed work orders, open work orders, maybe a certain date range. We also have the ability to show them things like our airfield inspections, right. So in this case, we’re able to show them just our special airfield inspections. But you can also show them other things like our day or night airfield inspections. And this example, if we’re clicking on the airfield inspections, again, it’s going to bring us to a grid tile, where we give access to see these entries. In this case, we have just one that was entered. But this can be a date range for the past 365 days. So we can set that parameter and just show them the past 365 days. You have that control on what parameters you’re setting.
Scrolling down a little more, we have some of our training records that we’re able to display. The nice thing is, we can group these by individual employees, but these tiles are interactive. So if we actually click in, we can see more information about Alan. And we can see all the dates of when he took his training, specifically what training they were. And if they actually click on this tile, it’s going to bring up that grid view to give a broader representation to see all the information here. Like again, when the date it was taken, we can sort this by if we want the actual database of the course, the date range, and we can scroll down and start to see you know the different courses that have been taken. So again, we are setting these parameters by using our really powerful filter tool. So you can see we get to set all these parameters, set up this saved view and have these links on the dashboard for them to be able to see. Going back to the main dashboard, scrolling down a little bit more we have a little bit more on some of the training so we can show a summary tile as well. This is a summary tile of the different trainings for the 139-319. So all the emergency personnel training and we can see all the information in these tiles. You can click on any of the numbers. And what that does is that brings you into that grid view again to see how many entries are there for a specific person. Again, we are giving them access to click on this, but with Observer Access, they cannot go in and make new entries, they can only see the data that we are providing them.
So we keep track of the training we use, we provide that information in the dashboard, we can also put things like our inspection records, right. So we want to know things like our airport fueling inspection records, our self inspection form, here’s all of our day self inspection forms, day or night, we have them listed here as well. So again, this is going to show a date range of what parameter we set. Scrolling down a little bit more, we have the movement areas and safety training. So more on the training, and then down a little bit more, we have our accidents and incidents and our condition reports. So with this, again, there’s no two that are going to be the same, it really depends on what your inspector wants to see. But as you can see, these are very customizable, we can move positions to these, we can add additional tiles in here. But the really nice thing is, is this is something that can be set up, you know, on your own, we can kind of walk you through how to do this, but it’s a very easy setup to be able to set up a private, separate operational space to invite your inspector in as a guest, we even can kick them out with access after a certain timeframe. So when the inspection is over, we can kick them out. And then we can just reset this up for next year when we have to do our, you know, our 2023 or whatever inspection for the year after. So really nice, easy setup for them to come in, see all this virtually. And this will narrow the time down that they have to spend doing inspection for just a couple of days rather than being at your airport for an entire week. All right, I’ll go ahead and pass it back off to you, Dia.
Everything You Need in One Place, Anytime, Anywhere
Dia Wynn 16:51
All right. So I just wanted to go over a couple of things on this dashboard that Jeff showed you, that make this unique to your organization. These are tiles that I added here that show the requirements and authorized access. To me, my OCD, very organized mind, right, I want to see the exact items. Usually you get a letter from the FAA saying, “Hey, we’re coming to do this inspection on this date. These are the 12 things we’re going to look at”, right. And you can just go right down that list for all of the things that are not practical fields, for our inspections on the field, you can make a tile to show everything. So for the inspection reference items, this is I put this in here to show that you don’t this isn’t just an airfield, right, you can put in your ACM you can put in your AEP, you can put in your ALP images and your marketing and signage plan that they asked for. Some certifications inspectors ask for a list of all your staff that work on the airfield. You can create that in Veoci or you can put it here as a link to an image. They ask how you deal with discrepancies, you can put your work orders in here. The other thing that we didn’t show is depending on your setup, your work orders can be and usually are linked right to your area of inspection form, right? So when you’re cert inspector goes in and says, “Hey, I’m looking at the day inspection on March the 12th and I see that you found a discrepancy, and this shows unsatisfactory”, they can actually click right on that link for that work order instead of having to come back to this dashboard. So they can follow that pathway, which is usually what they want to see, right, your inspection, your work order, and then the closure of the workload. So they can all do it in one line without you having to walk them back and forth through everything.
Training records, you can put a lot of training records stuff in here. If you use an external LMS system, we can import records from that. If you have it linked to your badging system, we can do an integration import records from that. Every certification inspector is different, right? Some want to see the record with a signature. Some just want to see a date, some want to see the full content of the training record. So whatever you want your certification inspector wants, you can set up your training management that way. And that can be presented on this dashboard. So again, this is just showing how you can change the size, unlimited lines that you can put to be links to the documents that your inspector wants. Your inspector usually wants to see how did your emergency group train everybody on the AED that year? That could be a whole other tile of the training, or you could just put in here a link that goes to a PDF that shows the date, the content and everybody’s signature for signing.
So the other thing that we wanted to highlight with all of these different tiles and like I said, this is my OCD organized mind is I wanted to see everything boom, boom, boom, that the inspector wants to see in order. Makes it very simple for the certification inspector to find exactly what they’re looking for. And we wanted to highlight that you can decide how you want to share this content. You could make one big tile that shows 50 lines of a table if you want to. Or you could do something like this, where you can break down the records by number, you can break down by the type, you could break down by the date. It’s unlimited how you display it. But this gives you a couple of visuals of your different options for displaying your information. So some of the advantages of using this system. Obviously, I’m very passionate about aviation and about the system. And I really feel that every airport that uses Veoci is that much safer. You can digitally share your records, right streamlines having to look and find this inspection or that inspection. If your supervisors or your management are checking on a daily basis or through alerts, you can know if a certain record that was required was not put in or was not completed. You can give access to just who needs it and for just the time they need it. And that can be an organization decision on, do we want them to always have access to this FAA dashboard, since we’re always in compliance, or do we just want to give it for that week that they have the certification inspection? So the other thing is, especially with COVID happening, right, and certification inspections changing a little bit, your inspector now can just be on site for two days instead of a week. They can review all of your records and all of your documentation in advance, and they can let you know in advance of any issues that they find. That way, when they show up, there won’t be a need for a letter of correction, you’ll have already had that either remedied, or have the documentation answer the questions. Really super useful.
All the records within Veoci have date and timestamps. So there’s no falsification. I mean, I’ve never had a certification inspector say “I don’t think that you really did this”, but that’s not even an issue in Veoci, because everything is date and timestamp. Like I mentioned earlier, you can easily correlate all your work orders, all your NOTAMs, all your dissemination of information for discrepancy reporting in one spot with inspectors following the thread very easily. And finally, again, what you display and how you display it is up to you. So I’m very passionate about training. And so I did want to do one more poll, if y’all don’t mind, asking how you document training records, because I feel like we all, there’s not consistency with the FAA and how they want their records documented. And it’s something that we all take very seriously because it’s not just a regulation, right. It’s the safety of our airfield.
So it looks like 31% of us are doing it on paper and pen. Totally get that and again, that goes back to some cert inspectors who want the paper hand in their hand. LMS third party systems, it’s a great way to do it, and I know like at SFO, we did paper and pen, and we did an LMS type the badge. So then we would have to immediately correlate the two right and then interestingly I wonder what the other is if anybody wants to share what that other is in the chat, we can share that. Okay. So that’s it for my part of this webinar. I just wanted to share information with you veoci.com. You can email Jeff or I directly if you have any questions. We are going to be attending the following three conferences this year. Next one coming up this coming weekend at AAAE, we hope to see you there. And we will also be at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam in October if you happen to make that one. So one other question for you real quick. Are any of you attending Seattle?
Okay, so it looks like most of you are not going to be at AAAE, but fear not. If you have any questions about Veoci, we can help you with your FAA compliance, you can email us, we will get back to you right away. So now I’m going to turn it over to Julie, do we have any questions?
Q&A
Julie Reynolds 25:51
Thank you so much Dia and Jeff, this was so informative. I learned so much. I’m sure a lot of our attendees did. This is just really, really useful. So thank you for taking the time. Yeah, questions are open, please use the chat feature on GoToWebinar. If you have any questions, I do see one so far. Are you able to do tabletop training, or really any kind of training through Veoci?
Dia Wynn 26:15
That is a great question. And yes, we can document and plan and manage all your training needs through Veoci. Actually, we can have Jeff share some of that through another dashboard view anyone would like to see. Are there any other questions? Otherwise I’ll pass it off to Jeff to do that.
Julie Reynolds 26:38
We have another question here. How much of these solutions are built out on your own or by the customer versus how much is implemented by the folks at Veoci?
Dia Wynn 26:50
Okay, that’s a great question. So that really is gonna depend on your needs. Everything that you saw on the screen today, can be built by the client themselves without, without help from Veoci. The system’s very, very easy to use, no IT background required. No, you know, weeks long, specialized training. You can modify this, you can create new solutions. You can do all of that on your own, or we can help you. Or we can, we can do it for you, or we can help you do it. So everything that you saw on the screen can be done today by the client themselves.
Julie Reynolds 27:33
Thank you, Dia. Someone was wondering if you can print credentials and badges out of Veoci so that employees can be ID’d.
Dia Wynn 27:43
We do not currently integrate with a printer. But we do have clients that use us to manage their full badging system. Everything from fingerprints to the CHRC to tracking their training, to the design of their badge, and what icon they’re gonna put on their badge. But it is something, yes, it is something we can do.
Julie Reynolds 28:12
I’ve actually got Keith Basile. He’s one of the leaders on our Solutions team. Who would like to chime in? I’ve unmuted you, Keith.
Keith Basile 28:21
Thanks, Julie. Yeah, just on that badging question. I’m going to refine Dia’s answer a little bit. There’s not really an integration need for badging printers, they usually just hook up to a computer or device as a printer. And so unless you’re trying to write to a chip in the printer, we can do it. We have folks that have typical badging printers, and they want to print a photo and an ID or something like that, or a barcode on it. Totally capable of doing it, it just hooks up as another printer on your computer or your tablet. And we allow us to create customized badging styles or output formats for those.
Julie Reynolds 29:05
Thank you, Keith. Awesome. I’ve got a couple more questions here. Do you have any sort of user group community for smaller airports?
Dia Wynn 29:16
We have a very extensive aviation user group. We have clients that range anywhere from small, local, GA airports, private use airports, all the way up to huge international airports, and aviation or airline clients. So we do have a user group where everyone can get together, we host specific aviation training. And everyone that’s a client has access to a group room together where you can share your solution, share your ideas, ask your questions, and use your peers as information.
Julie Reynolds 29:53
Thank you. We’ve got someone on there wondering if you’re running any specials or deals for smaller airports this year.
Dia Wynn 30:01
Give us a call, we will help you out. Like I said, I am an aviation person, right? I come from an airport and I strongly believe that every aviation client that uses Veoci is that much safer. And that’s what we’re about is keeping this industry safe. So please email me dia.wynn@veoci.com.
Julie Reynolds 30:24
Thank you. We’ve got someone wondering about EOPs emergency operation plans, can you upload those to Veoci?
Dia Wynn 30:31
Absolutely. Anything can be uploaded to Veoci. We accept any type of attachment, video, audio, any type of file, pictures, all of that can be uploaded. You can also manage your plans, your AEP, ACM, all of your plans through Veoci in a document management module, that would track all of your changes, you can type your changes directly in, it can be set up with a print template to print your document exactly how you want. And that way, you can send automatic notifications when you update a section and it only applies to tenants or fire. You can do all of this through the document management module. But yes, you can just do an attachment.
Julie Reynolds 31:16
All right, thank you. Do you have a Veoci certification program that we can use in applying for jobs?
Keith Basile 31:30
That’s a goal for this year. So we’ve been working on it on and off for the past couple of years, and we finally have some resources this year to take that on. So hopefully you’ll learn more about it later this year.
Julie Reynolds 31:43
Wonderful. Really cool. Oh, a couple more questions. Thank you, everyone for your engagement here. If we use Veoci and an incident occurs, can this be sent to our county emergency management?
Dia Wynn 31:56
Yes. The simple answer is yes. The more detailed answer is you as the client get to decide who, when and what except to whomever you want.
Julie Reynolds 32:10
Thank you. I don’t see any more questions. We are definitely not shutting the question feature down at any point. So please, if anything else pops up, let us know. But in the meantime, Jeff, did you want to show us a little bit about training?
Jeff Venditto 32:25
Yeah, I can show a quick dashboard we have set up here. So what we’re gonna do is switch gears, and we’re going to jump into some of the training. So this is again, just an example of what a training solution might look like. I know we have a lot of airports using us for their training records. So tracking all of your certifications for your employees, having reminders go out when training is going to expire, all that is able to be set up in Veoci.
This would be an example of maybe what the training manager or the person in charge of the training might see. So a dashboard like this where they can see a high level view of all the current records for their employees, right, the list of the staff, so we can click on any of the specific staff. So let’s just say we want to see this specific person, we can click and we can see all the different training sessions we already have logged for that employee, when the date of the training was, when the expiration date was, and even a link to that specific class training record. So we can go down the list and we can see all the information.
We can even set up a print template for this to have this printed off or sent by email. So we have a solid record of that. We can also have a tile, a high level overview of a tile, of expired trainings. So we know that we’re taking these training sessions, when are they expiring? We can even have notifications, like I said earlier, go out to either the individual employer, maybe the person in charge of training that this is coming up to an expiration. We also have what trainings are currently assigned. So in this case, we have all the different dates of the trainings coming up, who the instructor is, what is the course that’s going to happen, and if we click in a little bit more, we also are able to attach any kind of records as far as documents that are going to be provided in the training, maybe a slide deck you want the employee to read prior to the training or bring to the class. So all that information can be attached here and really get a high level overview as well as having some charting capabilities of you know which employee took what training, how many trainings did they take each year, and things along those lines.
But as far as creating a new training course or a new class training record, pretty straightforward in this example solution. We’re just clicking the “create a new training record”. We’re picking a date of which training we want to take place. And then we’re picking from our database of the courses that are already chosen or created on the fly, which one are we going to set up? So in this case, I’ll just pick wildlife. And then we’re putting in who the trainer is, we can also attach some of the records as well. And we can do multiple, if we have multiple trainers, it’s automatically going to calculate the expiration date, based on what parameter you put in. So we can set it to calculate whether it’s six months, a year or two years, however you want that set up, we can do that. And then we can put in, like I said earlier, the record for the actual training if there’s any PowerPoints or attachments, you want the actual employee to read over or just have as far as their information goes.
So again, just a very brief example of the training solution, we have a lot of airports using a similar solution to this. We can also set up their own dashboard
