Airpro: Read & Sign solution digitalised hundreds of thousands of acknowledgement receipts per year

Images: ©Airpro Oy

The Read & Sign solution developed for Airpro, a specialist company operating in the aviation industry, has proven to be a highly effective and versatile tool for sharing information and ensuring its reception. Airpro has estimated that, for them, the solution has digitalised hundreds of thousands of paper acknowledgement receipts per year.

“What has not been documented does not exist”

Airpro had a genuine need for the Read & Sign solution. Acknowledgement receipts for a vast amount of information, instructions, changes and policies had been collected by pen and paper until early 2024. This made it extremely laborious to share information and collect, document and track acknowledgement receipts.

“At its worst, we had supervisors running after employees with paper documents, trying to collect acknowledge receipts. This was not sensible use of anyone’s time,” says Training & Process Manager Jani Nyberg.

For Airpro, the pressure to obtain different types of acknowledgement receipts and to keep track of them in real time comes from both rapidly arising communication needs and the strict regulation in the aviation industry. For them, acknowledgements are not a nice-to-have but an absolute necessity.

Airpro’s Quality & Safety Manager Timo Venäläinen was one of the original innovators and developers of the solution.

“If an auditor asks us to prove that a certain employee is aware of a certain process, we have to be able to do so. What has not been documented does not exist,” Venäläinen sums up.

Reliable information, saved time and good search functionalities

Airpro now uses Read & Sign across the organisation to share critical information and work instructions, and for safety communications required by customers such as airlines. Users include all Airpro’s approximately 1,400 employees.

Individual airports have also been offered the possibility to use the solution locally. Many have taken up the offer.

“Some of our sites use Read & Sign to share the minutes of weekly meetings, for example. The fact that people want to use it on a voluntary basis is, in my view, a sign of a successful solution,” Venäläinen says.

Time is now saved both in acknowledgement receipt collection and follow-up measures. Employees no longer have to find their way to the document to be acknowledged; the document comes to them instead. Notifications and reminders of missing acknowledgement receipts can be sent automatically at pre-determined intervals.

One of the solution’s strengths is also its wide range of search functionalities. This way, reliable and up-to-date information is easily available for different purposes. For example, customers can make searches at the document level, supervisors at the employee level, and employees can check their own acknowledgement receipts.

“The end result actually exceeded our expectations. The idea was to roll out the solution across the organisation over a longer period of time, but deployment at the first sites was so successful that we brought it forward by a little over a month. Everything works superbly, and user feedback has been unbelievably good,” Venäläinen reports.

Rego plays a major role in Airpro’s digital ecosystem

The aviation industry is a forerunner in many aspects of risk management, and Airpro is happy to operate as a pioneer. The company is keen to further expand digitalisation in different business areas.

Close collaboration with Qreform also continues. New co-development plans are under discussion for Rego, and there are also a few next steps in the development pipeline for Read & Sign.

“Rego plays a major role in Airpro’s digital ecosystem. We appreciate the good cooperation with Qreform and the system’s diverse future potential,” says Nyberg.

“We had an excellent development team working on Read & Sign, but without Qreform, the end result would not have been as successful. The contribution of Qreform’s Tommi Leppänen, in particular, was highly valuable, and his ideas and experience in safety management were significant for the final result. We are very pleased,” Venäläinen says.