Air Lease

Launched in 2010, Air Lease Corporation (ALC) is an aircraft leasing company based in Los Angeles, California that has airline customers throughout the world. ALC and its team of dedicated and experienced professionals are principally engaged in purchasing commercial aircraft and leasing them to its airline partners worldwide through customized aircraft leasing and financing solutions.

As a confirmed Microsoft house, Air Lease wanted to implement SharePoint Online to create “a more cohesive Office 365 environment”. They were also keen to move away from iManage after ten years due to its limited adoption across the busines and restrictive external support. “There were a lot of frustrations with the system” said Assistant Vice President, Business Systems, Pinella Shapiro.

Air Lease had struggled to find a partner to meet their needs until they found Proventeq and were won over by our proven best practice process and our Migration Accelerator software’s ability to meet their advanced meta data inheritance requirements.

Following a successful proof-of-concept in October 2019 we worked with Air Lease to develop a three-phase migration plan across six months, so as not to overwhelm their end users.

The migration presented several significant challenges:

• Inefficient management & support: iManage system support relied on an external party, which restricted their capabilities and reactiveness, leading to delays in updates. Now Air Lease are able to support their new SharePoint platform internally.
• Business executive buy-in: Directors and legal team, although frustrated with facets of iManage, were used to it after ten years and nervous about the potential disruption of migration After evaluating the success of Proventeq’s proof-of-concept the business was won over to SharePoint.
• Specific legal date requirements: Other companies they spoke to could not retain dates on documents – date created; date modified. But Air Lease wanted to keep all of their meta data. Proventeq were able to do this by tailoring the SharePoint architecture to Air Lease’s specific requirements.
• Limited reporting impacting productivity: Air Lease’s legacy iManage system didn’t have an inbuilt reporting function, which restricted the optimisation capabilities of the business systems team. The reporting functionality in SharePoint driven by PowerBI integration now gives Air Lease deep insight into their content and its usage.