Should you build or buy flight school management software?

In our many discussions with pilot training organizations on the topic of flight school management software we sometimes meet organizations that have started the journey of building their own customized software solution (or are considering to start).

Many, mainly medium sized and large, training organizations find that this as an alternative to subscribing to a solution like FlightLogger, mainly justified by a wish for a solution that fits their exact needs a hundred percent.

Buying/subscribing to a standard solution for your pilot academy or building one yourself is a big decision. Without doubt, the choice you make will have impact on your academy’s future efficiency and growth. That’s why we have put together this article to share the knowledge and experience we have gathered from working with academies from 40 countries during the last 10 years.

We apologize that it’s a long read, but we do think there are lot of things to consider before you make such a crucial decision.

First, a disclaimer

When it comes to choosing between building your own solution vs subscribing to a professional training management platform, we admit to be biased by the fact that we represent one of the most popular SaaS solutions for pilot training organizations. Still, we like to think of ourselves as trustworthy advisors to the industry, which we think most of our partners would agree on. Also, the following recommendations are not arguments we made up for the occasion, but things we have experienced in our dialogue and cooperation with customers and non-customers.

Fact is, we have seen again and again how academies initially choose to go down the road of building a solution themselves only to come back a couple of years later to start with FlightLogger after trashing their own solution. Despite several years of hard work and huge investments in their own software, these academies eventually faced the fact that their own software never reached the level that the academy required, and that the ongoing maintenance cost were way too high.

Actually, our primary aim with this article is not to specifically convince you into choosing FlightLogger but rather to convince you to thoroughly reevaluate your reasons for building a custom solution.

Adopt the learnings from three real examples

From working with pilot academies in 40 different countries over the last 10 years, we would like to share with you three anonymized, but real-life examples of training organizations that are today using FlightLogger after first commencing the adventures of building an inhouse solution.

Here are three examples of organizations that joined FlightLogger after trying to make a custom-built solution:

Example 1

This large pilot training business (Academy A) employs over 3,000 professionals and operates from multiple locations in six countries, creating a total net sales of EUR 476.1 milion (2018). Among other activities, it provides training services for one of the largest European airlines in Northern Europe. Additionally, the organization is an international provider of defence security and aviation life cycle support services and technology solutions.

After years of building and maintaining their own software to help the academy be efficient and keep up with their growth, they decided in 2017 to change to FlightLogger. 

Despite Academy A’s huge inhouse IT-resources and no lack of economical funds they still decided to stop their inhouse development of a training management system and change to FlightLogger. What they realized was that their inhouse system would never reach the high standards of what their academy really required of a training management system, no matter the resources they put into it.

We have seen many other academies who choose to change to FlightLogger for the exact same reasons – one of them is one of the largest academies in Scandinavia, who after many years of inhouse development decided to abandon their own system to change to FlightLogger in 2020.

Just like Academy A, they realized that their inhouse system would never be able to keep up with their own requirements but also that the time they spend on software development could be more efficiently spend on the academy by letting others take care of the software.

Example 2

One could argue that the reason why the academies in the first example did not succeed in developing and maintaining their own inhouse system – despite their huge amount of resources and economy – were that they did not have a long and deep insight into the aviation industry and thereby were not able to specify/design a system that could manage the complexity that lies in managing daily operation of a pilot academy.

But no one can say that about this second example. Academy B is founded and owned by one of the world’s most renowned and respected airlines, for whom they provide pilots via their ATPL program. Nevertheless, Academy B also decided to stop their inhouse system to go all in on FlightLogger in 2020.

The main reason stated for this decision was that the ongoing maintenance cost were way too high compared to the monthly subscription of FlightLogger, which again provided a more advanced solution than their own system despite years of inhouse development.

Example 3

Our third example, Academy C, is among the largest modular academies on the British islands providing almost any training program you can think of. They had staff employed with plenty of development skills, and they decided to build their own system instead of changing to FlightLogger when we were first in contact with them. They firmly believed that it was both cheeper and better to do it themselves on the long run.

Years later we received the following email from their management which says it all:

“Years back we got a very good advice from your CEO Kenneth Jeppesen which we chose to ignore. Back then we choose to develop a system in-house but, now the persons that developed it is moving on to better things. We would therefore like to move to FlightLogger.”

The above examples show that neither huge investments, deep industry knowledge or inhouse development experience is really enough to reach the high standard of what a professional academy needs from a flight school management platform.

Why are some organizations still relying on custom-built software?

This is a reasonable question to ask and somewhat difficult to answer completely. However, one obvious reason is that managers who have already invested in their own system are naturally reluctant to throw out the system and change to a professional solution as they must accept a “loss” of what they invested initially.

Hence we experience that managers feel trapped in their own system, facing the fact that they have to continue investing fortunes in maintaining the system to avoid throwing out all these investment costs for nothing. Accepting that such development investments turned out to be a sunk cost is simply not easy, and presenting it to management is even worse. Nevertheless, accepting this loss is very often the best and cheepest decision for the future of most academies.

We’re not claiming that this is always the situation. We acknowledge that there are probably examples of academies that succeeded in building a well-functioning custom solution. We are just not very familiar with them and we are quite convinced that it requires some very unique circumstances for this to be the best decision.

But let’s take a dive into some of the actual considerations you should do when deciding between buying or building.

Flight School Management software is no different than most other software

When talking about flight school management platforms, the question of whether to build your own software solution or buy (or subscribe to) a “standard” solution is not any different than for most other software. Think about the software stack used in your organization for a moment. Did you build your own bundle for writing documents, working with spreadsheets and sending emails, or are you relying on Microsoft, Google or another provider? Did you build your own ERP system? How about your website platform? Probably not, right?

Ten years ago, you maybe had to build something yourself for managing the specialized daily operations of a pilot training organization, because there weren’t many standard solutions available. It’s different today. There are at least a handful of proper solutions that can solve most of your needs, some better than others. Maybe they don’t fulfill all your needs, but when you think about it, neither does your ERP system, right?

So, unlike ten years ago, the circumstances for choosing a flight school management platform today have become very similar to when choosing most other software – and therefore the arguments for buying versus building have become more or less the same as well.

Therefore, these are some of the most important factors to consider:

Costs

While some academies believe that building software in-house is a cheeper solution, our examples above shows the exact opposite. First of all, the initial cost of specifying and developing version 1.0 is significant. On top of that, you actually won’t know what your solution will be like before it’s been developed, where as most standard solution vendors are happy to show you their solution, allowing you to know everything before making any investments.

Worse yet, even the best planned projects are prone to go over budget and deadlines. When subscribing to a standard solution, startup costs are known beforehand and compared to building a custom solution they are minimal. That’s just how the reality is, and this probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to most of us.

But what really surprises many is how expensive the ongoing maintenance for running a modern training management system (or any software for that matter) is. Just like an aircraft, a training management system needs constant maintenance, otherwise it will never be able to keep up.

When building your own software your organization must for example handle these tasks:

• managing the code
• launching the solution
• pushing out upgrades and bug fixes
• providing user training
• managing password setup and resets
• managing security and backup
• securing compliancy with industry standards and data privacy regulations
• creating system documentation
• building new functionality etc.

Software providers that don’t monitor and keep a high level of maintenance of their solution will eventually have an outdated software with more and more issues and bad performance. Also, you will probably want to define an internal service level agreement to make sure your system and users is functional at all times. To do this, it means you must have a support team ready at all times.

As a comparison, we at FlightLogger have a large team of dedicated developers today who release major updates with new features and fixes approximately every month. But behind the scenes, weekly, and often daily, updates are released to keep the system performing well. We are able to split the cost of running these development and support tasks between more than a hundred customers, which means the cost per training organizations is way lower even when applying a margin to these costs.

Apart from that, when using a subscription based system, one of the biggest advantages is the scalability of costs. During low activity periods (or if the world is hit by a pandemic), costs can be lowered to a minimum from month to month, and then adjusted back up when the time is right. A custom built solution is not nearly as scalable as you can probably imagine. Salaries still needs to be paid, servers and software still needs to run and be maintained, and users still need to have support and training.

Not least, the subscription solution will still be getting new features and full support no matter how bad business is.

Security and Compliance

IT security is a constant moving target and we can only speak for ourselves that staying ahead of security issues takes a huge effort and investment. Our team has a high focus on data-security so our customers can sleep well at night. Again, remember that your software is your production and auditing tool – consider the consequences if someone hacks your inhouse system including all your data.

Using a quality standard solution means your data and compliancy issues are taken care of according to best practices so you don’t need to hire experts to do it. By choosing a top solution you will not only leave the responsibility to a professional partner, you will also have the opportunity to have data synchronized to your own file servers to add an extra layer of security and not worry about data and compliance issues.

Compare this to a situation where you have built the solution yourself. The compliancy and documentation regulations are exactly the same. How much time and money are you willing to invest in ensuring top level data security to your own inhouse system and do you even have the required expert knowledge inhouse?

Stick to your core business

One of the corporations that we Danes are always proud to mention is the toy manufacturer LEGO. At the beginning of this century, LEGO was on the verge of bankruptcy, when the Danish businessman and former McKinsey consultant Jørgen Vig Knudstorp joined the company.

In 2004, Mr. Knudstorp was promoted to CEO and within just a couple of years, he managed to create a historic turnaround to make LEGO the global success that it continues to be today.

Shortly before being assigned as the CEO of LEGO, Mr. Knudstorp read the book “Profit from the Core” by Chris Zook. In short, the book’s conclusion was that the company that understood its core business and which constantly tried to strengthen it, was the company that was most successful. Correspondingly, a company should be careful about starting up any new enterprises that lie outside its core business, thus risking neglecting the core by pulling away both leadership and economic resources.

Jørgen Vig Knudtorp was so inspired that he decided to apply the principles described in the book, cutting all non-core business away from LEGO’s activities and leaving just the very core – the LEGO brick. The rest is history and the learnings have since been appraised and followed by many.

Our point with mentioning LEGO is of course that you must make the same considerations. What is your core business and how does developing a piece of complicated software correspond with this?

Developing software takes much more than developer skills and a couple of good ideas. From our experience, the initial research and specification, design, dialogues with our customer and final testing is at least 2/3 of the whole process when developing a new features. These tasks require deep insight knowledge into your industry and workflows, and more than that, they require that you continuously set a strategic direction for where the solution should be going.

In other words, you must assign a substantial amount of leadership and strategic decision making on developing your own software; critical resources that otherwise could have been used to create profit from your core.

So, the overall question is where you want to put your focus, on being an efficient flight academy or also on being a software house.

How much will you pay for the perfect solution?

You have now been presented with some examples and reasons for why creating a custom-built flight school management platform is something to be considered thoroughly. Again, we admit that we are somewhat biased, but we do genuinely believe you should have some very special reasons for going down that road.

The fact is, most pilot training organizations will probably be able to find a standard solution that offers at least 90 % of the features of “the perfect solution”. Buying a standard solution would mean you may have to compromise on those last 10 % that would make it fit perfectly, but how is that different to your other software?

You still bought the ERP system and lived with a solution that wasn’t 100 % perfect, because building it yourself wasn’t even an option, we reckon. Do the last 10 % custom functionality really justify all the downsides we have highlighted?

All in all, there’s really just one question to sum up your decision: if these companies we told you about didn’t find that they had the knowledge, time or willingness to invest what it takes to build an inhouse system – why should it be the right choice for you?