Aircraft leasing company improves content management

A lessor leans into smart information governance

This full-service commercial aircraft lessor provides fleet and financial solutions to airlines across the globe. Since its founding a decade ago, the organization has helped meet the evolving needs of more than 50 leading air carriers with hundreds of aircraft in dozens of countries.

To ensure accurate reporting for its parent company, comply with FAA regulations, and increase internal collaboration, the organization needed a more modern and reliable way to store, organize, and share its information and records. With Microsoft and RecordPoint solutions, it found exactly what it was looking for.

Recognizing room for improvement

Aviation companies operate at the bleeding edge of technology. This particular business was no exception—its top-of-the-line aircraft fleet was proof of that.

But the organization’s office tools had become outdated. The company had reached the limits of what it could achieve in terms of information storage, content organization, and file sharing.

As a member of a well-known global conglomerate, the organization was expected to regularly provide reporting to its parent company. It needed to share legal, financial, and other critical information—and the business was hard-pressed to do that in its current state.

Plus, because the aircraft leasing company works with so many airlines in the highly regulated aviation industry, it must make sure it adheres to all FAA requirements. Carrying on with an insufficient content management system would make that extremely difficult.

Of course, there was also the matter of internal collaboration. Without a modern platform, the organization had created major inefficiencies that prevented its staff from productively working together.

There had to be a better way.

To ensure accurate reporting, comply with FAA regulations, and increase internal collaboration, the organization needed a more modern and reliable way to store, organize, and share its information and records.

Taking flight with RecordPoint

The company understood that there was no place for outdated tools in a state-of-the-art organization. The business was more than ready to modernize its current operations, but needed some extra support.

Enter RecordPoint.

Together, the lessor and RecordPoint explored the options available, and the team kicked off its engagement with a fact-finding mission. RecordPoint engineers met with the enterprise’s principal records managers, general counsel, and others to discuss:

• What did the company hope to achieve?
• What did its content and records currently look like?
• How was that information being stored?
• How was it being shared?

Arriving at a solution

Following several days of discussions to answer all the team’s questions, SharePoint Online emerged as the solution to the organization’s problems. The tool had all the functionality the company needed.

And by implementing the full Microsoft 365 suite, employees would not only benefit from SharePoint Online, but Microsoft Teams and other apps, as well.

Multiple staff members could simultaneously collaborate on a Microsoft Word document, easily chat about the updates through Microsoft Teams, and safely store the file in SharePoint Online.

Then, using Microsoft Power Automate, employees could secure approvals for the documents they worked on—helping them meet the demands of the parent company, the FAA, or other organizations.

Additionally, by leveraging RecordPoint cloud infrastructure, staff could better manage and classify their content in one centralized location and ensure it was retained in accordance with specific partner policies, file plans, and records categories.

To enable all these capabilities, the organization and RecordPoint created a pilot plan, with the initial deployment focused on the company’s leasing department and legal group. In the future, the organization plans to roll out the solutions to its finance, marketing, and operations teams.

One of the organization’s records managers reduced the time it takes to pull reports and provide input to the parent company from a week to a couple of hours.

Significant time savings and more

It wasn’t long after implementation that the company began experiencing favorable outcomes. Migrating its information from a legacy system to a state-of-the-art platform helped the organization to:

• Modernize its user experiences
• Boost employee productivity
• Add a layer of transparency to its data

But the one area where the company has seen its biggest improvement is information management time savings.

Employees no longer have to engage in the long, laborious process of creating documents—such as letters of intent, leasing contracts, and shareholder reports—and emailing them to multiple people for co-authoring, co-editing, and approvals. They’re stored in a centralized database, so collaborators can more easily work on the items together in real time and quickly share them with others upon completion.

In fact, one of the organization’s records managers reduced the time it takes to pull reports and provide input to the parent company from a week to a couple of hours.

To use an aviation term, the lessor’s processes now fly at supersonic speeds.