Founded in Melbourne in 1992, MizziSoft first developed a workforce-management platform for the high-paced casino industry, but has since expanded its service to a web-based platform well suited to aviation. CEO John Michael Mizzi explains how the company’s customisable one-software approach can improve efficiency, fast.
What is MizziSoft and what does it offer to the aviation industry?
John Michael Mizzi: MizziSoft is bringing a revolution to the aviation industry. We supply a full workforce-management system that includes planning, rostering, leave management, attendance, payroll, day-of-operations issues and an employee portal – all in one piece of software. Our solution is delivered via internet browser, making deployment easy and inexpensive.
What makes this one-software web-based approach so revolutionary for customers?
The small airport ground handler with 100 employees can now have the same technology as a ground handler with 100,000 employees, for a monthly subscription per employee of no more than the price of a cappuccino and a doughnut. What’s more, the database can be activated within five minutes of a call with us. We believe that this is revolutionary.
How can the product help to improve cost-efficiency in airport workforce management?
Having all the software in one package makes our system more reliable and cost-effective than multiple systems ‘glued’ together. With the multiple-system approach, information is often caught up in delays between systems, which is why aviation payroll departments end up doing the bulk of their work manually on paper and in Excel, causing errors, mispayments and, ultimately, extra stress for employees.
We want to enable the aviation industry to look at the whole picture instead of just tiny parts of it at a time. We can provide roster planning and day-of-operations information in real time, and we can help reduce overtime payments for payroll by keeping track of the offending carriers causing overtime so that we can flag such issues.
How does the system compare with conventional airport approaches to workforce management?
Most ground operators only focus on planning the roster and day of operations. They don’t realise that, for the system to work correctly once the roster is published, employee clockings also have to match their roster and be approved by managers. MizziSoft’s smart automation, including auto-approval of swipe-ins that fall within a grace period, saves the supervisor the time and effort of doing all the work on paper.
Another issue that is usually ignored is leave balances. We provide a lot of intelligence for this so that employees can apply for leave from the employee portal and, if their balance is insufficient, the leave is automatically rejected.
Another aspect that could save huge amounts of overtime is banking hours for winter and summer schedules. Once all paid and unpaid leave is planned in the roster, swiped and approved, the next big step is payroll. We have an advanced payroll system that can be easily customised; once a change is made in the roster or leave balance, it automatically reflects in the payroll in real time.
A lot of software used in aviation is still of the 1990s’ Windows-based client server, which makes it expensive to maintain, deploy and update. With our secure web-based software, all these issues disappear, because updates are deployed instantly through the browser. We also have replication servers in different countries so that if one server goes down, others are available. All this greatly reduces costs.
How does MizziSoft’s experience in other industries, such as entertainment, help improve best practice in aviation processes?
We bring in new ideas from the entertainment industry and institutions such as call centres, where good service is of primary value. For example, when phoning a call centre, a customer normally only waits in the queue for a few seconds or minutes; why can’t we do the same in aviation, for passenger queues for check-in and other services?
In aviation, we can analyse queues for the flight and forecast volumes on a 15-minute basis so that operators can ensure enough counters are opened to keep the queues small. I have, many times, had to wait up to 90 minutes in a queue to check in, and have sometimes almost missed flights because of this. If all is planned correctly, we need not expose passengers to check-in stress.
To what extent can MizziSoft be tailored to the individual needs of clients, and how do you support your clients around the world?
MizziSoft is very happy to customise its software for its clients, and our yearly subscription costs are much cheaper than traditional software. This software can even be offered as a service for which all the work is done by MizziSoft and the customer just uses the system for the end result.
To keep costs down, we provide this full service to our clients from our 24-hour support centre in the Philippines. From here, we help our customers with system set-up, rostering, leave planning and payroll using our software. This keeps training costs to a minimum as the customer finds the end result ready to use without having to learn the whole system. We also provide analysis on how to improve the roster for better efficiency.
We do a lot of the back-office work in Asia and – because ours is a web-based platform – customers can access this work in real time even if they are on the other side of the planet.
What visions do you have for your future work within the aviation industry?
Although we started doing a lot of work for aviation in the mid-1990s with Air New Zealand, Ansett and Qantas, our main bread and butter has been the casino industry, which, like aviation, is a highly specialised industry. I hope that aviation opens doors for our revolution and helps us introduce our concepts to operations so that they can not only save a lot of money, but also pave a way forward for happier employees and customers through greatly improved service.
