Business Spotlight - ProvenAir Technologies
Listen in to an interview with Jim Boccarossa, President CEO of ProvenAir Technologies, conducted by Will Dent of AeroParts Now.
Will: I’m here with Jim Boccarossa with ProvenAir Technologies. Jim, tell us what ProvenAir Technologies is, and what it does for the industry.
Jim: Good afternoon, Will. ProvenAir is a system that analyzes and dynamically generates back-to-birth trace history for life-limited parts. [It’s an] automated way to prove out the provenance for all of your engines, landing gear, APUs, and any of those life-limited components.
Will: Jim, I love the tagline, evolving the concept “software-as-a-service” to “services embracing technology.” How did you get started in all of this?
Jim: My wife had started a company called Air Spares Unlimited in which they focused on aftermarket landing gear, and I worked with her for a number of years, and one of the most difficult things about buying, selling, leasing, exchanging that material was performing the back-to-birth trace analysis. We were doing it by hand. We had two full-time people manually going through hundreds of pages of documentation, in no standard format, and filling out discrepancy sheets or open items lists on spreadsheets.
Will: Tell us a little bit about how other companies have started to embrace ProvenAir.
Jim: Probably the best way companies start to use our system is that they’re running into this pain of having to evaluate the paperwork. Suppliers were looking to move material, and they wanted to do it quickly. Well, ProvenAir saved them a ton of time, it also increased their quality.
We’ve done, in our system now probably close to 3,500 sets of landing gear in our system, and not one them, when they were first ingested had perfect back record trace.
Will: So, as a supplier, I have this great trace now for these high-value assets. What can I do with them, as far as in my quoting process and sales process?
Jim: So as you know, Will, once you find the part you’re looking for, the first thing is negotiating a price. What’s the next thing? “Send me the paperwork,” right? So on any of your high-value assets—engines, landing gear, components of those assets—it’s imperative to have the back-to-birth trace.
So at that point what you can do with companies like AeroParts Now, if you have a component of a landing gear you are trying to sell, or an engine that you’re trying to sell, you could provide your customer what we call “guest access,” which is a link to ProvenAir to just that part, not your entire inventory, just that part you’re negotiating with a potential customer, so that supplier can offer that. And their prospect, their customer can simply click through, see a dynamically-generated timeline, and then they can make their own decision on the part themselves. And they can run the report there, section report, full records packet, LLP sheets, movement traceability sheets—on demand, so there’s no “email me this,” or put it in my Dropbox account, or “that’s the old one, I’ve got an updated document from the airline,” or any of that because it is being done dynamically, and everything’s digital at that point.
Will: How do you get started with ProvenAir? The moment you pick up the phone and call Jim, and you’re like, “look, I need some help with back-to-birth trace.”
Jim: You get … everything’s web-based, just FYI, so all you need is a browser to use ProvenAir. All of our customers have their own tenant, meaning they have their own section. Nobody sees any other person’s paperwork, everything is yours. And you simply can do “file and upload.” That’s all you do.
We even offer white-glove service—our analysts will say, “you have it in Dropbox or Box or email me a zip file.” We’ll take it there are load it for our customers. That’s all they have to do. And once everything has been digitized and run through the ProvenAir algorithm, the customer simply logs in, and sees a digitized timeline and sees all the exceptions that ProvenAir found—either missing paperwork, serial number mismatches, whatever it finds. And then they can simply run reports, search, sort, view, even share those timelines with their supplier or their customer to help with the transactions as well.
See Jim and Will at PBEXPO 2022, Booth #487
Going to PBEXPO 2022? Be sure to stop by booth #487 to meet Jim and Will! Learn more about ProvenAir’s back-to-birth part tracing technology, and see live demonstrations of the AeroParts Now aircraft part sales platform. Don’t miss it!
