Gama Aviation: a single source of informational truth built for aviation-grade compliance

By Amber Oakes, Product manager

Gama Aviation provides business aviation services worldwide, including private jets and air ambulances, in one of the most heavily regulated industries there is, answering to regulators that include the UK Civil Aviation Authority and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. Around 1,300 employees need real-time access to policies covering safety, flight procedures, technical standards, HR and IT, and a number of those policies only apply in specific countries. Before Xoralia, those policies lived across a patchwork of repositories that different business functions had built up on their own, which made everyday access slow and made proving compliance to the regulator disorderly. Gama Aviation brought policy management into the SharePoint intranet it already had, using Xoralia to attest, target and report on every policy from one place. Gama's libraries associated with Xoralia now hold and structures over 5000 policies and procedures, with 94% employee attestation against the ones that apply to them.

Aviation regulators expect solid evidence, not an assurance that a policy exists somewhere in the business, and for a long time that assurance was closer to what Gama Aviation's own systems could offer. Its operations cover private jets and air ambulances across multiple countries, each with its own regulator and, often, its own version of a policy. Safety procedures, flight operations, technical standards, HR and IT policies had each lived inside their own business function, with their own repository and their own way of naming and storing things. An engineer in one country and cabin crew in another were rarely looking at the same system, and a policy owner trying to confirm who had read the latest safety procedure had to chase that answer by hand, function by function. When the Civil Aviation Authority came asking for evidence, the evidence existed, it just was not anywhere that could be pulled together quickly.

Does a fragmented policy estate sound familiar to your circumstances? Speak to our team to see how we can support your own compliance challenges.

Gama Aviation had just introduced a Microsoft 365 digital workplace, built around the SharePoint intranet named Horizon, and Horizon was the obvious place to solve the policy problem properly, rather than adding yet another system for employees to remember. A standalone compliance tool would have meant a new login, a new place to check, and a new habit to build on top of an intranet people were only just getting used to. Building the policy library into Horizon meant policies lived where employees already went first. Xoralia was chosen after a product review against that requirement: native SharePoint integration, and attestation features built for exactly the kind of sign-off aviation regulators expect. The decision was reinforced by an existing relationship. Our team had already delivered the SharePoint intranet itself, so extending it with Xoralia was a natural next step rather than a leap of faith.

A single site to contain all policies. The centrepiece is one single document management site, built into Horizon and holding all 5000 of Gama Aviation's policies, procedures and compliance forms. Employees can search for what they need or browse by business function, country or topic, so cabin crew in one country are not accidentally reading a technical standard written for engineers in another. On the homepage itself, personalised web parts show each employee the documents they must read and any of their own documents due an update, and the information security policies page pulls its list straight from the associated Xoralia library by naming convention, so it always shows the current version rather than a copy someone remembered to update by hand.

Policy attestation. Attestation is where the compliance story actually gets proved. New starters confirm they have read the safety and flight procedure policies relevant to their role as part of onboarding, and every employee is required to re-attest annually against the policies that apply to them. Across the workforce, 94% attestation is now recorded and reportable, which takes the statement "people have been sent this" into something a regulator can see evidence of.

Library ownership by business function. Rather than one central team maintaining every policy, each business function, aviation operations, maintenance and health and safety among them, now owns and manages its own library within Xoralia. A policy owner in one team can publish and update their own content without waiting on IT, while employees still find everything through the same search and browse experience on the intranet, Horizon.

Document workflows. Gama Aviation has a legal requirement for policy owners to review and sign off their policies annually, which used to mean a policy owner remembering to do it and chasing colleagues who had not. Xoralia's document workflows provide a smooth and semi-automated capability to update documents with scheduled reminders, and support the multiple stages of review and authorisation some policies need before they go live. Any document updated with Xoralia means Gama can produce a clear record of who reviewed and approved what, and when.

Reporting and audit trail. When a regulator asks Gama Aviation to demonstrate that policies have been read and reviewed as required, the answer comes from Xoralia's reporting instead of having to gather data from each business function.

Built on the platform's own API. Gama Aviation's IT team has also taken the capabilities of Xoralia further to provide custom reports where there are unique requirements. Their CIO uses Xoralia's system API with a PowerShell script he wrote himself to pull specific data, including a reporting hierarchy that is separate from the Line Manager attribute in M365. Utilising Xoralia's API alleviates the need to manually assemble a monthly report by hand. He has also built his own charts, broken down by business unit, aircraft management and charter, technology and outsourcing, special mission, maintenance repair and overhaul, and fixed base operations, which get dropped straight into leadership packs. It is what an open API and a well-structured platform let a capable in-house team build for themselves.

Mobile access. Flight crew are not always sat at a desk, so policies are reachable through the SharePoint mobile app, Microsoft Teams on mobile, or the iPad-based electronic flight bags crew already carry. The same attested, up-to-date policy is available on the ground and in the air.

Curious what else Xoralia can do? Explore the full feature set.

The 94% attestation figure provides more than just a number, it also resolves a critical business problem. Before the document management platform existed, proving that the right people had read the right policy meant assembling evidence from whichever repository a business function happened to be using, and hoping the record was complete. For an operator whose licence to fly depends on its regulator trusting that answer, the uncertainty is the real cost when under scrutiny. With 5000+ policies now in one single location, attested and owned by the teams closest to them, Gama Aviation can confidently tell in minutes whether they are compliant to regulations.

See what a Xoralia policy library actually looks like inside SharePoint.

If your own policies are spread across as many systems as the people who own them, get in touch to talk about bringing them under one roof.

Read more Xoralia customer stories.