Read our series of interviews with the people who are making the Yocova platform come alive. Here we speak to Andrew Doyle from Cirium, who’s been enjoying the benefits of Yocova since shortly after it was launched in early 2020.
With over 26 years of experience in the aviation sector, Andrew, a qualified aviation engineer, spent 18 years working in aviation journalism before moving across to specialise in data products and analytical services within the aviation sector. In his role as Senior Director, Market Development at Cirium, a leading data and analytics solution provider within the industry, Andrew is responsible for managing Cirium’s strategic relationships with aircraft manufacturers, aftermarket providers and systems suppliers. He is passionate about discussing industry trends and challenges with customers with a view to building the most effective information products and with different teams across Cirium. Andrew’s role is to develop deep relationships with clients to understand the principal challenges their businesses are facing and to deliver solutions with data and analytics to help them solve those problems.
We talk to him about how he has utilised the Yocova platform and the benefits he has found being a member.
Why did you become a member of Yocova and when?
“I became a member, around March last year [2020] and was aware of the Yocova platform, but the immediate incentive to join was the onset of the coronavirus crisis. Like many other people in the industry we were thinking about the looming challenge, not only for airline operators but also across the industry, from aerospace OEMs to the aftermarket service providers and everybody else in the supply chain. We’d had this very rapid grounding of a large part of the fleets during that initial wave of the virus around about April time, so it then became very important to engage with the community to discuss the restart when demand came back – how all of the stakeholders would coordinate to make sure every link in the chain would function as it needed to, to ensure that the aircraft could resume flying again.”
Yocova has different memberships available for individuals, enterprises and Independent software, data and solution vendors (ISV/IDV). What benefits do you get from Yocova as a member, as an individual?
“Well, it’s the networking opportunity. It all stems from that. Being able to connect with people and then have a mechanism to progress those relationships to something tangible. The knowledge sharing and having the opportunity to learn and discover insights as part of engaging with the platform.”
A big part of my role is to develop relationships in the industry, so one of the first things we did was to set up some airline roundtables [in Yocova] in collaboration with the Yocova management team. We invited representatives of the airlines from their engineering and maintenance and operational departments, and we talked through the looming challenges for what we call the planned and predictable recovery of operations. That enabled me to gain very valuable insights into the challenges that aerospace companies and airlines are facing. We identified some specific challenges that airlines were facing, for example how to support their key vendors in their own supply chains, as of course many of those vendors are facing very challenging times themselves due to the reduction in flying, but also things like the technical issues that can arise from aircraft being in storage for a period of time. There was an opportunity to share knowledge and insight from some of the technical challenges that can arise from that.”
What are the benefits from an Enterprise and ISV perspective?
“There was a gap in the market, if you like, for a neutral place where the industry could come together to discuss these kinds of issues. At Cirium, we are very open about how we work in partnerships and are not exclusively aligned to Yocova, but Yocova is really quite a unique platform where any stakeholder in the industry can sign up, and has a Marketplace for vendor solutions. We recognised the value of being involved and saw the community grow.
We want to play our part in delivering solutions, which requires different vendors to work together. We have what we call a foundational data set, we have a fleet database, schedule data, flight and tracking, and aircraft valuations data, so we want to take every opportunity that we can to engage with potential partners in the industry to deliver solutions collaboratively.
In terms of industry challenges and networking needs, what do you think Yocova addresses?
“I think the opportunities to collaborate have been limited by the fact that most people are not able to travel at the moment, so the traditional channels by which this could happen have not been open for the past 12 months. So industry conferences or working groups – the traditional way of doing things – has not been an option. In terms of online, virtual collaboration, it’s been really quite fragmented [historically] so nobody had the full infrastructure that’s needed to do this effectively, to have a community discussion platform, but also mechanisms for data vendors to share their capabilities and data feeds.”
What benefits do you think Yocova will deliver in future?
“Yocova is very well positioned to play an important role in the planned and predictable recovery of aviation, but we are not at the point yet where that recovery has begun to kick in. There are still plenty of people in the industry who have not taken the opportunity to engage, people who we believe could benefit when we get to the point where we are standing up some of the thousands of aircraft that are in storage.
I think we are going to see a fundamental shift in the industry, and the airline industry that emerges the other side of this crisis will be an industry that is a lot smarter with data. There will have to be a step change with efficiency – airlines will have to do more with less, and they will have to operate their aircraft fleets more efficiently with higher levels of reliability. The only way that the supply chain and all of the vendors the airlines work with will be able to help the airlines achieve that will be through ongoing online collaboration. Even when we have the opportunity to meet again face to face and attend industry events and conferences etc, those alone will not be sufficient to deliver the kind of data collaboration that’s going to be required.”
Yocova is structured around the pillars of Community, Marketplace and Data Rooms. What benefits do you think these provide to its members?
“It’s a one-stop shop, if you like, where you have the Community platform but also the seamless link with the Data Rooms and the Marketplace. It’s a way of streamlining the process of connecting with the people you need to connect with, but also learning about the data and analytics that are available to help solve challenges. It’s an easy way to network and find out about other vendors, and to learn about some of the challenges they are helping to solve in the community. Being able to connect with airline and vendor communities simultaneously enables us to join everything up in an elegant way.
Cirium has products available in the Marketplace, so it’s an important channel for us to connect with potential consumers of our services or stakeholders we can potentially collaborate with. The future is going to be all about blending different data sets to generate fresh insights, and that’s something the aviation industry had been slow to achieve prior to the pandemic, as there were many distinct silos of data around the industry but no way of connecting those silos and releasing the insights that would benefit everybody. It’s still not straightforward, there are still a lot of debates about control and ownership of data, and it’s going to be a gradual process I think as we all work together and find ways to free up these data sets and work with them in mutually beneficial ways.”
For more information, to contact or collaborate…
You can contact Andrew on Yocova via his personal profile.
Top image by John McArthur courtesy of Unsplash
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