A Year in Review: Reflecting on 2020 at Brock Solutions

Dec 31, 2020

As 2020 comes to an end, we recognize the pandemic has had a huge impact on everyone in the aviation industry, including our customers, partners, and employees. We believe it is vital that we stay safe and continue to work together to get through this difficult time and restore our industry.

Throughout 2020, along with our airport and airline customers, Brock Solutions proactively explored new innovations to face this year’s challenges and to rapidly streamline operations. We implemented several quick-to-value projects including new baggage room displays to reduce mishandled bags and a touchless passenger journey from check-in to arrival.

Although we had to defer our biannual Airport Automation Summit to 2021, we were able to bring together the SmartSuite community for our first virtual Users Group. Meeting over Zoom across 3 days, 180 users across North and South America, Europe, and Australia shared their ideas and feedback directly to Brock’s development and support teams.

In the week following the Users Group, we were thrilled to receive our second Firebrand Award from Inductive Automation! This year’s award was for leveraging Ignition to replace existing baggage systems with a single Upper Level/SCADA, as the first critical step of the Baggage 2025 program with the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA).

Throughout the year, some of our airport customers continued to focus on projects and improvements to ensure their operations are ready to meet demands following the pandemic. Several projects that successfully passed factory acceptance tests or had a successful go-live with system upgrades from Brock Solutions this year include:

We were excited the work with Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport to launch our reimagined SmartSuite Enterprise (watch the full VLOG here). We focused on a simpler and seamless end-to-end experience for users who need to access data from multiple disparate systems and enabled this data to be shared outside the baggage control room with airline operations. We are excited to continue this development in 2021 in collaboration with more of our key airport and airline clients.

Although there was a temporary pause in most project activities, some airlines focused their attention to accelerate a few ongoing programs that will bring immediate benefits to customer experience and operations that included:

  • Two airlines rolling out an end-to-end customer facing baggage tracking app trial
  • Two airlines moving to production, a system-wide automated weight and balance solution integrated with SmartBag (BRS)
  • One airline rolling out a system-wide, real-time, cargo/commodity tracking system

We thank you for your support this year! While we may not know what 2021 will bring, we are optimistic, and we are here to help, and will continue to develop innovative solutions to support your future challenges and look forward to celebrating success.