On iQSMS User Conference

This week, we got to attend the iQSMS user conference, hosted by ASQS in Vienna, Austria. ASQS, which stands for Advanced Safety and Quality Solutions, is a company that offers its iQSMS software, that is used especially by airlines. They regularly host this user conference to inform their customers over past developments, news and upcoming features. There are over 400 customers, who now use iQSMS and ASQS is operating from three locations, in Vienna Europe, Calgery Canada and Bangkok Thailand. Since airlines and airplanes or constantly in use all around the world, they use  those three  offices to offer tech support around the clock. We have been in contact with ASQS for over a year now, and it was very interesting to see everything they do and meet both them and many of their clients. In this post we want to briefly blog about our experience at the event and what we took away from it.

A web-based Safety, Quality and Risk Management System for aviation by midjourney 

The presentation of new features included the planned rollout of the Quality Management Module Version, QM V4. There is a variety of upcoming things, like frontend features, e.g. new widgets for ease of use, as well as backend features like a new database structure. Users rightly asked how the database change will affect them and they were assured that all data is safe. There is going to be a new API for users to interact with, which is also going to make interacting with the platform faster and more comfortable. Many of the features had been requested in the past, and there is a whole new set of wishes that the customers have. Like, we were there when ASQS developers were asked by various customers about different wishes that they have, and how it is one of ASQS tasks to prioritize what of those wishes they can and will attend in what order.

We had been to similar events before like Microsofts Power Platform conference, but usually we are users of the product ourselves and can therefore relate to what the customer demands are or what the impact of newly released features and changes will be. In the case of iQSMS we are not users of the software outselves, so we were quite curious about what is happening and how are customers receiving it.

Participants were asked to not share photos of slides, as there will be a proper publication by ASQS themselves. 

One of the biggest announcements (at least to us) was that ASQS was recently bought by Comply365, who now plan to merge the software and services with their existing solutions. We got to talk a bit with Comply365 representatives about how the plan to do the merge and what they had learned from previous mergers. The had a slot during the event where they explained to the audience, their reasoning for the acquisition and what kind of benefits they are expecting from it. One example use-case that was brought up is, imagine a department discovering a previously undiscovered risk in a process, they might create an audit with complience department using their compliance software, and create both training documents and a training schedule for the affected personal, all within their software platforms. We were also shown a demo of their DocuNet software, which they use to e.g. provide manuals and regulation text. When asked, they said that DocuNet does not yet contain generative AI features, but they are actively looking into developing those.

View of Vienna from above.

Lastly we want to briefly touch on what our addition to the event was and what some of our thoughts were. We first were in contact with ASQS a bit over a year ago and helped them adding an AI feature for classifying reports. During the event we got to give a presentation about that feature including how it works, what its benefits are and what is necessary from a customer point of view to be able to use it. We had a view very nice conversations about it, including with an airline, that we ourselves are flying with somewhat regularly. Also, and this is somewhat unrelated, during the event we were reminded of a different software company that we had worked with in the past, Mondas. While the company is operating in a completely different sector (timeseries data analytics for mostly energy companies), they were similar to us, in the sense that both offer software platforms handling data, are small to medium size enterprises and we worked with them as partners, i.e. had regular sessions with some of their developers in order to bring value to third parties.