Scheduling on a large scale with Leon SCHED

Scheduling flights is a tough nut to crack, that is for sure. Having tens, even hundreds flights a day requires an enormous amount of planning and resources. Airlines face a lot of uncertainty while creating schedules ahead of the moment the actual flight operations take place. Until now, Leon has been great when it comes to business and holiday charter ad hoc scheduling, but missed a few key cogs essential for a full-fledged airline management system.

A solution for airlines (and BizAv too)

This is where SCHED comes in. We have developed its functionality to address the core aspect of the airline line of business, providing the market with a much needed tool to efficiently organise the round the clock schedules. While its functionality won’t help you to predict all the factors that are taken into consideration during the planning stage (as we believe that such forecasting is best suited for appropriate dedicated solutions), SCHED has all the necessary tools to work on a large scale, creating new schedules, managing many of them at the same time and publishing for a smooth transition to your current operations. Even if you are not in the airline business, as a business operator you can still take advantage of the new module, if at least some of your flights are planned on a persistent basis.

How does it work? SCHED allows to schedule flights with certain timeframes and rotations, using flights and their pairings that operate in a consistent way (on certain days of the week or biweekly, for instance). After publishing a schedule, scheduled flights are available for your OPS department in the ‘OPS’ section as any other non-scheduled one.

As scheduling requires to operate on a virtual basis, a lot of flexibility in terms of tail assignment is definitely needed. Because of that, at the moment SCHED handles only the fleet of virtual aircraft, which can be added in Leon and switched to an actual aircraft after the schedule has been published.

The future of SCHED

SCHED is currently entering its beta phase, which means that the development process is far from being over. Within the next year we will be releasing a number of improvements and extensions to the current functionality, including a new algorithm for adding flight pairings and an option to assign company’s clients with pairings. Depending on the community feedback, this list can grow to a greater extent. The release of SCHED module also comes with a completely new purchasing model.

“With SCHED, we are opening a new chapter in the history of Leon, offering a diversified, complete solution to representatives of three major lines of business in the modern aviation,” commented Paweł Kruk, CEO of Leon Software. “Leon already is a great tool for business aviation and flight support companies, but we want to make it an even more competitive piece of software for scheduled operators as well.”

With the introduction of SCHED, we feel that there is also a growing need to further diversify the way our offer is being tailored to the needs of various types of customers. Because of that, we are also enhancing our philosophy to provide a product best suited for individual requirements without the need of customizing it for each client individually. We have been already turning heads when it comes to the level of customization available in Leon for some time, now we want to make the next step by increasing your flexibility even further with new modules, available as an option.

SCHED will be one of the first optional, purchasable modules available in this new model. We are really excited about features that SCHED brings to the table in terms of schedule building, therefore we want to offer its functionality to all of our current clients completely free for one full year, starting from the beginning of 2020 and until the end of the beta phase. It should be a great opportunity to test it for yourself without any commitments.

Additionally, outside of the standard subscription, we won’t be charging for any of core features already available in Leon.

As always, we are eager to hear your feedback on the SCHED functionality and its new features available alongside. Let us know by contacting our Support team.

Also, don’t forget to check our Online Wiki, where you can find an extensive overview of our new module.

Not yet a member of Leon community? Contact our Sales team to find out more or jump straight into the 30-day free trial.