Online Scheduling

I have used ScheduleMaster and Aircraft Clubs and find that both are
excellent resources when configured properly for the situation they are
being used in.

In a flying club, where the organization is not geared primarily around
high volume instruction, the online resources work well. The
Schedulemaster program has a 1-800 phone interface, so persons without a
computer can make or change schedules (or if you are away in the plane
and need to extend your booking..etc). We have a computer and phone line
in the clubhouse for persons who dont have their own computer and choose
to book at the airport.

I also have been involved with a flight school that used the
schedulemaster program, and while the program itself was great, the
implementation by the school was problematic. The school was a small
up-start and made a big investment in computers, but persons who were
coming in to make arrangements for primary instruction were being set up
with accounts and told to book their lessons online in advance. The
instructors were there at variable times on variable days and did not
always block out their "down time" so students would book them when they
werent even going to come to the airport. Also, after hour bookings were
problematic because there was little to no after-hours access. A better
method would have been to have the instructors and the front desk
utilize the dispatch mode and schedule all dual for the students so
there is no confusion. I am not sure that a traditional flying school
would realize all the benefits of a subscription scheduling service when
perhaps a homegrown excell spreadsheet might suffice.

Dave

Greg Esres wrote:
Our flight school is currently trying to move to an online, internet
based scheduling system, using a service provided by "MyFBO".

The idea is to schedule via the internet (even when standing at the
counter at the flight school) for all flights that occur after the
current day. Every morning, the staff will print out a schedule for
the day and any changes for that day must be done to the paper
schedule.

The consensus of the flight instructors and staff is that the
interface is extremely difficult to use, and slow. There will be only
one computer available for all users to make changes to the schedule
and the internet connection is a bit flakey. While frequent users
will probably be able to learn the system, it seems unlikely that
students/renters will develop any kind of proficiency with the system.
As far as I can tell, there are no contingency plans about what to do
when the system goes down.

Does anyone have an experience with online scheduling with large
flight schools? How well did it work?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Greg,

The FBO I trained at uses MyFBO. This is a flight school with four or five
planes, and maybe 100 students. I would say this system is no better or
worse than its peers, each has their advantages and quirks. As a customer,
I think this is one of the best things the FBO did for business. I almost
never call to schedule a plane, instead I just book online at my
convenience. Actually, since I own I mainly schedule instructors these
days, as do several other students. There is a modest learning curve, but
overall the system is not that difficult to use. There are other advantages
you didn't mention, such as printing out dispatch sheets, record keeping
(allows customers to track hours and account balance), and so on.

The MyFBO site has been fairly reliable, I can think of only a handful of
times when it was down, and usually not for more than a few hours. When
this happens, the FBO reverts to pencil and paper scheduling. If your
internet conneciton is flakey, then this is a concern as flight instructors
and desk staff will be using this system frequently. If you can't improve
the connection, then this system is probably not for you.

Somewhat off topic, but the other addition the FBO made was to install a
wireless router to open their connection up to customers. This has been
quite useful for flight planning in the FBO lounge.

best of luck,
mark

"Greg Esres" wrote in message
...
Our flight school is currently trying to move to an online, internet
based scheduling system, using a service provided by "MyFBO".

The idea is to schedule via the internet (even when standing at the
counter at the flight school) for all flights that occur after the
current day. Every morning, the staff will print out a schedule for
the day and any changes for that day must be done to the paper
schedule.

The consensus of the flight instructors and staff is that the
interface is extremely difficult to use, and slow. There will be only
one computer available for all users to make changes to the schedule
and the internet connection is a bit flakey. While frequent users
will probably be able to learn the system, it seems unlikely that
students/renters will develop any kind of proficiency with the system.
As far as I can tell, there are no contingency plans about what to do
when the system goes down.

Does anyone have an experience with online scheduling with large
flight schools? How well did it work?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Greg Esres wrote in message . ..
Our flight school is currently trying to move to an online, internet
based scheduling system, using a service provided by "MyFBO".

The idea is to schedule via the internet (even when standing at the
counter at the flight school) for all flights that occur after the
current day. Every morning, the staff will print out a schedule for
the day and any changes for that day must be done to the paper
schedule.

Why would you ever print out the schedule? Just buy a $50 old computer
(or have a member donate one ready for the trash) and just look a the
schedule on the computer? If you print it out, its going to be out of
date within minutes. Its an oddity of the older generation that they
want to print stuff out and turn off their cell phones.
-Robert

Why would you ever print out the schedule? Just buy a $50 old
computer (or have a member donate one ready for the trash) and just
look a the schedule on the computer?

I'm not clear on why they decided this route. Probably in case the
internet connection goes down when there's a bunch of people standing
at the desk to get their airplanes.

If your internet conneciton is flakey, then this is a concern as
flight instructors and desk staff will be using this system
frequently. If you can't improve the connection, then this system is
probably not for you.

That's probably the biggest concern.

In my view, a proper design for a system of this sort would be to have
a locally installed computer program to do the scheduling, and then
providing internet access to that data, rather than having the entire
application internet-based.

A true windows program can provide a much better user-interface, would
be faster, and insulated from internet problems. A loss of internet
capability would only be a minor inconvenience.

Thanks for your comments.

Thanks to all who commented regarding the online scheduling. Sounds
like everyone found it a positive.

I do wonder, though, whether a purely internet based system is more
targeted towards "flying clubs", which generally don't have the
resources to be fully staffed.

Our school has 40 instructors (lots part-time) and 20 airplanes. We
normally have two people behind the desk from 7 am to 8 pm, 7 days per
week, 363 days per year. I have always been able to schedule by
making a 30 second telephone transaction, which I could handle while
driving down the street.

I suppose they would still offer that service, though it will now take
them a lot longer to actually record my flight than it would have by
just writing on the paper schedule.

I'm a software developer, so I'm definitely not against
computerization, but I've seen enough poor implementations to
understand that not all operations are improved by computerizing them.

A better implementation, in my view, would be to have a locally
installed computer program to do the scheduling, and then providing
internet access to that data, rather than having the entire
application internet-based. A true Windows program is faster and
could provide a much better user-interface.

Our support staff, and flight instructors, are all against this online
scheduling, and are betting that the schedule book will be back in a
couple of weeks.

In article ,
Greg Esres wrote:

Thanks to all who commented regarding the online scheduling. Sounds
like everyone found it a positive.

I do wonder, though, whether a purely internet based system is more
targeted towards "flying clubs", which generally don't have the
resources to be fully staffed.

Perhaps. But in our case computerization was what let us use the
staffing resources previously used for scheduling elsewhere...

Our school has 40 instructors (lots part-time) and 20 airplanes. We
normally have two people behind the desk from 7 am to 8 pm, 7 days per
week, 363 days per year. I have always been able to schedule by
making a 30 second telephone transaction, which I could handle while
driving down the street.

A common scenario: it's 10pm, I've just got home from work, and I want
to know when I can next book 4JG from 7pm to 10pm on a weeknight...
with our online system, that's a trivial operation.

We don't have 40 instructors or 20 planes (more like 12 / 6), but the
situation is somewhat similar, except -- and I think this is the big
difference -- the attitude of nearly everyone involved was positive
when we introduced it. As a club we've been email- and web-literate
almost since it was possible to be that way, and using the web to
conveniently access the scheduler whenever and (almost) wherever you
were was seen as a huge advantage. And there's not a person involved
who'd want to go back to the old system.

Interestingly, we also had the scheduler phone / voice command access
turned on for the first two years of use -- and no one ever used it. I
deleted it and no one noticed except our accountant.

I suppose they would still offer that service, though it will now take
them a lot longer to actually record my flight than it would have by
just writing on the paper schedule.

Why "a lot longer"? It typically takes me seconds to enter a new entry
in our system. It's certainly quicker than our older paper and
computerized versions.

I'm a software developer, so I'm definitely not against
computerization, but I've seen enough poor implementations to
understand that not all operations are improved by computerizing them.

True enough. (I'm a web app developer myself). But these apps have been
around now for years, and seem to have settled on a set of features and
interfaces that work well, and that are reliable.

A better implementation, in my view, would be to have a locally
installed computer program to do the scheduling, and then providing
internet access to that data, rather than having the entire
application internet-based. A true Windows program is faster and
could provide a much better user-interface.

But the speed of our online browser-based scheduler simply isn't a
factor -- it's almost instant. The interface isn't particuarly pretty,
but it's sufficient and does its job well. And reliability has been
100%, rock solid, for at least the last three years -- the system goes
down for maybe a minute or two a week on average.

And besides, why reinvent the wheel? And allowing internet connections
to your club system opens up all sorts of security issues, especially
if, as it sounds like, not everyone there is exactly net-literate.

Our support staff, and flight instructors, are all against this online
scheduling, and are betting that the schedule book will be back in a
couple of weeks.

Well, I'd have to say that with a club attitude like that, they're
probably right. Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy, to me...

Hamish

In article ,
Greg Esres wrote:
In my view, a proper design for a system of this sort would be to have
a locally installed computer program to do the scheduling, and then
providing internet access to that data, rather than having the entire
application internet-based.

Right. Either way you need a reliable, full time internet connection,
but at least if the schedule is kept at the flight school then the
failure of the network doesn't take away your scheduling.

I wonder if there's a market for a 'scheduling appliance' in the FBO
market...

--
Ben Jackson

http://www.ben.com/

My FBO uses schedulemaster.com as well. It's not the prettiest
interface but it works well. There's also a phone interface if you
don't like computers : )

The FBO has 20+ planes and at least 100+ active and somewhat active
renters/students. The paper system was a pain, to schedule something
you had to call it in- and you were on hold because someone else was
calling in something. And of course the other caller wanted to
schedule 10 lessons, but a few days were already booked and they
wanted to see the schedule for other days and planes and..... Online
booking is soooo much eaiser now. Just log on and click on the
day/plane and you're done. Schedule/delete sessions in a few clicks,
do a search for all your upcoming (or previous) sessions, it's all a
breeze.

It did take a while to get used to. It seemed like the owner and old
school pilots didn't take to computers well. But when the owner saw
that he could get rid of a front desk person because of it..... (as
least I see one less person now : )

-lance smith


Andrew Sarangan wrote in message .158...
The club I belong to uses www.schedulemaster.com. Another FBO I instruct
at uses paper scheduling. There is a world of difference between the two.
However, I have not been able to convince the FBO that an online
scheduling is a good way to go. Probably the main reason for this is the
management is not very comfortable with computers.


Greg Esres wrote in
:

Our flight school is currently trying to move to an online, internet
based scheduling system, using a service provided by "MyFBO".

The idea is to schedule via the internet (even when standing at the
counter at the flight school) for all flights that occur after the
current day. Every morning, the staff will print out a schedule for
the day and any changes for that day must be done to the paper
schedule.

The consensus of the flight instructors and staff is that the
interface is extremely difficult to use, and slow. There will be only
one computer available for all users to make changes to the schedule
and the internet connection is a bit flakey. While frequent users
will probably be able to learn the system, it seems unlikely that
students/renters will develop any kind of proficiency with the system.
As far as I can tell, there are no contingency plans about what to do
when the system goes down.

Does anyone have an experience with online scheduling with large
flight schools? How well did it work?

Thanks for any thoughts.

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 03:05:56 GMT, Greg Esres
wrote:


Does anyone have an experience with online scheduling with large
flight schools? How well did it work?

Thanks for any thoughts.

When I went to work at a new flight school here in Colorado, The
bossman was into the pen and paper scheduling. I had came from a
flight school in Texas that used ScheduleMaster which I thought was
great, but I know the cost can be a bit prohibitive. So I set out on
searching for something else. What I came up with is a PHP type
scheduler that is open source so that I could change it in a way that
it would fit the school. It was originally designed for scheduling
meetings and rooms, but with a little code change, we now have a full
blown aircraft/instructor/lasergrade scheduler. It took me about 8
months to convince the bossman we needed to go to this type of
scheduler. We put it into place in January and it has worked
superior. HE moaned and groaned for about 2 weeks about how it was
inconvienant for him to now look at the schedule, when all of our
customers were raving about how great it worked. After about 2 months
of seeing how it increased our business and the convience it added to
our customers, he actually came up to me and thanked me for doing
this. This program will actually do resource analysis also. It will
tell you the most popular times and the most popular aircraft at a
click of the mouse among other things.


The original open source for this program is located at
phpscheduleit.sourceforge.net . it is very easy to manipulate if you
now php. We actually changed it significantly will ease.

If you want to see it in action, drop me a line and I can set you up a
temp user name on our beta site so that you can play around with it.

Scott
c o f l y i n g @ p c i s y s d o t n e t