Client Applications - In-Flite Manager

In-Flite Manager

We all know the feeling of sitting in an airplane, just having reached the flight's altitude, and waiting for the first refreshments to be served. Have you ever caught yourself contemplating about the immense and huge logistical efforts and coordination crucially necessary for any passenger aircraft flight? This is also, if not especially, true for the air transportations' catering efforts to be organized and taken care of for every booked seat, for any aircraft landing or taking off at any airport on the globe.

The In-flite Manager is a built-in software system, and represents a vital tool for the In-flight Catering Industry, providing decisive help for all these time-critical and schedule-sensitive organizational and planning tasks to be most efficiently taken care off.

This application nicely illustrates the degree of complexity and functionality that can be achieved in software development and/or design utilizing Xbase++. Mr. Julio Guerreiro, founder and CTO at In-flite Manager, in Portugal, decided to migrate the company's crucial application from Clipper to Xbase++ a couple of years ago.

The software design engineers at In-flite Manager greatly appreciate the fact that Xbase++'s database file architecture is entirely compatible to Clipper's DBF/NTX file-format. Hence, Xbase++ is engineered upon the concept of DatabaseEngines (DBEs), which in turn are comprised of several independent, individually useable (configurable) components. Mr. Guerreiro re-affirms, that only due to the sophisticated and flexible architecture of Xbase++'s DBEs, it has been possible for In-flite Manager to have left the original Clipper source code (nearly) untouched, while having migrated to Xbase++; in consequence having saved a lot of manpower allocation, costs, and head-aches!

The embedded flexibility of granting access to various database models available and deployed on the market, In-flite Manager's CTO stresses the fact, that this laid the groundwork for In-flite Manager to make its product attractive to small, medium and hub-sized catering facilities.

The In-flite Manager is currently being deployed at more than 12 major airport cookery services companies, organizing and setting up the in-flight meal services; and that's done irrespectively of whether the airline's business is operated on a national, regional, or global scale. Leading international airports, like Denver, Los Angeles, Newark, Honolulu, Cleveland, Bahrain, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Durban, Lisbon, to name just a few, are depending upon In-flite Manager in terms of their catering providers' services.

The unbeatable advantage of compound (and customizable) DBE design by the developer, lets the Xbase++ end-user application access nearly any database file format.

Inflite-Manager software comes with an array of different modules, such as:

The visual menu / recipe costing and concept planning feature, build upon the Xbase++ GraphicsEngine, allows you to visually compose the menu items and calculate costs in real-time. Using native Xbase++ JPEG, Bitmap, GIF and PNG support, this module makes it easy to import images, pictures or illustrations from various sources.
an automated invoicing module, that allows the catering business initiate invoicing already at boarding time of the aircraft. Thus, all necessary catering and eventual customs documents get generated, even before the catering job is carried out completely. It further allows any cost- and/or margin-analysis to be computed, before and/or while a particular catering job gets delivered.
the operations and logistics module not only covers anything related to move a meal from production into the passenger hands, it also knows anything about docks, trucks, flight changes and visualizes aircraft seat/meal assignments to help flight personnel to serve meals fast and reliable.
a rough material management module, that permits to track the availability of each menu item. Moreover, this module allows that any changes to the variable unit costs are updated constantly, facilitating cost- and/or margin analysis on real-time variable unit costs, which helps when placing orders for stock-replenishments.
a Virtual Help-Manager module, that provides instant assistance in getting familiar with any of In-flite Manager's modules; one will also be given tips, hints and workarounds.

It may have become obvious that running a catering business for the airborne mass-transportation industry, the ERP relied upon are to be running smoothly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. As it is imperative for In-flite Manager to guarantee the stability, reliability, high-performance and database-file compatibility to their international customers, according to Mr. Guerreiro, there was no other option ever considered than implementing In-flite Manager in Xbase++.

Furthermore, Mr. Julio Guerreiro revealed that a Web-based version of In-flite Manager, the eIn-flite Manager, is currently being worked on. This B2B-portal designed for the catering companies to access viable information about their customers, i.e. the Airlines, online, is built upon Alaska Software Technology’s WAA product.

Check out their website at http://www.inflitemanager.com

Are you doing cool stuff with eXPress++ and Xbase++, do you have deployed a solution driven by Donnay Software and Alaska Software technology, are you interested to give your work a wider market visibility? If so, we invite you to send details about your solution, your customers, deployment details and a feature-set description of your application to:

Sales@Donnay-Software.Com