Keynote Presentation - CAE

Transcript

Prasanth Mohan:Good afternoon. My name is Prasanth Mohan, and I'm the Director for Product Management within the Flight Operations portfolio of CAE. Before I go into the topic of the day, a quick introduction of CAE. So most of you must have heard about CAE already, and I think the first thing that comes to your mind is a flight simulator, and you wouldn't be wrong. Of course, apart from your lanyard sponsors that you see over there. We have been the market leaders for flight simulators for a long time going, and that continues to be a major part of our business. However, over the past 2 years or so, we have ventured into the flight operations software market as well. And today I'll give you an overview of what that looks like and also talk a little bit about the future of aviation and how CAE sees itself as a part of that space. I'm not going to go into the statistics of what you see on the screen. You can read it yourselves. But the point out here that we're trying to make here is that of the various operations that you as an airline follow, our solutions touch about 150 airlines globally, and about every 5 seconds or so, an aircraft takes off by using at least one of our solutions that you see over there. Today, CAE spans across multiple flight operation solutions. That includes operations control— that basically takes care of movement of aircraft— flight plan management, crew management, airport management— that includes resource and gate management— as well as end-to-end in-flight catering. I quickly want to touch about some of the outcomes of the pandemic. The COVID-19 situation caught all of us by surprise. Actually, by shock, if I were to make it sound more accurate. And some of the outcomes of that, what we've been seeing is starting with the workforce turnover. Quite a bit of people moved on from a career standpoint or retired or chose alternative careers. From a technology or infrastructure standpoint, many of the airlines decided to keep the lights-on mode and decided to keep their innovation on standby for the time being. And these operating environment continues to be dynamic and unpredictable. What we need to look at, and I'll come to that in a bit, is how do we ensure that we are prepared for the next one and how do we ensure that we can mitigate the risks as far as possible with these predictions that we wanted to look into? And it would be hubris on our side to think about not having budget constraints as an outcome as well. Before going into that particular topic, A quick overview of the past 30 years and the forward-thinking next 30 years. Technology has been a major part of the aviation industry for a long time, and it will continue to be so. But it seems the pace at which it has been evolving has been quite slow. If you look at some of the operating models or performances that we see around the globe, it hasn't changed much, or rather, it continues to be the same over the past 3 decades or so. However, the change of technology continues to be rapid, and we want to keep up with that from an aviation standpoint. There will be dynamism and uncertainty going into the future. The question is, how do we ensure ourselves to preempt those as far as possible? How do we use technology to be able to overcome those situations as far as possible in the near future? Also, from a technology standpoint, we also need to be flexible to adapt to these situations. as far as possible. In CAE, the solutions that I'll talk about in a minute or so focuses on both technology and airline operations. We want to leverage the cloud. That's the way forward. That's something that we all in the industry are aware of. How do we offer a service-driven model focusing on end-user experience, be it in-house? For example, our airport solution, which uses our tools to help our resources at the airport maintain their shifts or tasks. How do we make sure their experience is good? which then cascades into the experience of the passengers as well, let's say from an onboard catering standpoint. Similarly, data integration, and I'll talk about that in the next slide where you'll see that across the various solutions in the portfolio, how the data is connected and cascaded through to ensure your flight operations are as efficient as possible. The operations part or the airline operations part, as you see, we want to Make sure that there's the right balance between technology or machine and humans. Um, we've heard about the term human in the loop, and that's exactly the model that we are trying to achieve over here. We also want to break down the traditional silos. We don't want applications or operations to work in independent mode, rather have integrated data that helps you take decisions much faster. And also the disruption management or disruptions that you go through needs to be balanced in a much more seamless manner. Our goal at CAE is to be the market leader, and over the past, I would say, 3 to 4 years, we have invested a significant amount into this innovation from a digital standpoint. Now, going back, going into the various individual solutions and how technology is being used to help deliver the promises that we take to the market from a flight operations standpoint. So if you look at operations control, which is essentially a tool to help track and monitor aircraft from a movement standpoint, we want to be able to be using AI and ML technology to have ability to predict delays. When it comes to crew management, how do we enhance your productivity of your crew? Flight management, we want to anticipate your disruptions and take actions that help you mitigate them as far as possible. Airport management. We want to use the application to allocate your gates in the best possible manner and also your resources from a task perspective. We spoke about workforce issues in the past coming out of pandemic. This is where a solution like airport management comes into play to predict where the staff has to be given the qualifications they have and where they need to be assigned. And this helps mitigate those disruptions. at the airports. Quite a few of the panels spoke about sustainability, and that's what our in-flight application ideas to do, or rather, ambitions to do. We want to have algorithms in place that can predict the passenger on board with better accuracy so that the meal wastage is reduced to the bare minimum. Also, through tools like pre-ordering, we want to ensure that only the meals that are pre-ordered are being loaded into the aircraft, and also meal shortage. We want to reduce meal shortage, which has a direct impact on passenger experience. Last but not the least, the training management solution. We want to use these technologies to ensure compliance across the various training modules that we have for our airline customers. A few statistics that we kind of came put together is today about 5,000 kilograms of fuel is used per flight. on an average sector length, and about 4,000 meals are wasted per day per carrier. With the various technologies I spoke about earlier, our goal is to have at least 0.75% of fuel savings per flight and a reduction of 15% food wastage. What that does is it saves about 3.5 million kilograms of fuel savings per year per flight and about 500 million meal wastage reduction yearly. So basically, if you put it in terms of SUVs, it's about, if I'm doing it right, about 37,000 SUVs worth of petrol or gas for that matter. And food wastage is enough to feed over half a million people for a year, 3 times daily. So that's the amount, or that's the impact we have with the technology that we have in CAE to be able to help our airlines achieve these sustainability KPIs. With that, All right, I'm perfectly out of time. Thank you so much.

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