Blog How WestJet Avoided Turbulence With Insight Device Lifecycle Management

Effective device lifecycle management is the difference between an operation that takes flight and one that stays grounded. For WestJet, that reality plays out at 35,000 feet — and Insight built the program to match it.

Every organization that puts devices in the hands of its people eventually confronts the same uncomfortable truth: the hardware was never the hard part. The real cost lives in everything that happens after the purchase order. Warehousing. Deployment. Repairs. Redeployment. End-of-life. And in an industry like aviation, where a single dark screen can ripple into a delayed departure, that hidden cost carries realoperational risk alongside it.

WestJet knows this better than most. When a flight attendant boards an aircraft, the iPad in their hand isn’t an accessory. It’s the manual, the safety communication, the shift-trade system, and the card reader that keeps onboard revenue flowing. When a pilot reaches the flight deck, that device delivers the flight plan. As Craig Taylor, who started his career at WestJet as a flight attendant and now leads device procurement and the IT Solution Bars, puts it,“In aviation, there is no hold button. There’s no time for irregular operations. It’s costly. What we need it to be is seamless.”

That single word — seamless — is what the work is actually about. Here’s how WestJet got there, and what their journey can teach any leader managing a fleet of their own.

How WestJet operated before going digital

Rewind to 2017. WestJet’s flight attendants carried paper manuals; pilots hauled a heavy black bag of printed flight documents into the cockpit. Every time Transport Canada issued a change, crews hand-inserted pages into binders and got “fam checked” to confirm they’d done it correctly.

“Very inefficient, very time consuming,” Craig recalls.

The move to a managed Apple device program, starting with the iPad mini 4, transformed that overnight. Today, WestJet runs a deliberately tight device fleet: iPad Pro for pilots and maintenance teams now exploring AR-assisted aircraft repair, iPad mini for flight attendants, iPad Air for corporate users. The logic mirrors how WestJet thinks about its aircraft strategy — keep the fleet focused, keep training simple, keep maintenance costs manageable. The same principle applies to devices: standardize, and you simplify everything downstream.

But standardizing the hardware exposed a harder problem — the partners behind it.

What happens when your device support model is too fragmented?

In WestJet’s early managed-device years, the support model was fragmented. One vendor sold the devices. Another handled procurement. A third stored, configured, and shipped them. The mobile device management platform sat apart from the rest of the Microsoft environment the airline already ran. And the people Craig depended on weren’t even in the right province — his representative was in the U.S., the warehouse in Ontario, while WestJet’s home base is Calgary.

The result was exactly what you’d expect: missed asks, wrong devices shipped, and a procurement lead forced to audit every deployment by hand.

The mistakes and layers of coordination kept stacking. There was never one catastrophic failure, but a steady accumulation of small ones, each manageable on its own but collectively unsustainable. Something had to change.

When WestJet went to market across eight or nine RFPs, they weren’t shopping for a cheaper device and another partner to add to the mix. They were shopping for consolidation, proximity, and trust.

What’s the difference between a device supplier and a true partner?

This is the distinction every procurement and IT leader needs to internalize before signing the next contract. As my colleague Richard Okopien, who helped architect WestJet’s program, frames it: a device supplier sells you the asset, maybe deploys it, “then you don’t see them for the life of the asset.”

A true partner becomes an extension of your IT team. They process the full sweep of real-world events, from new-hire and onboarding to repairs and redeployments, and finally offboarding and refreshes.

That’s the foundation of Insight Flex for Devices — a program that brings together the purchase, deployment, multi-year management, and eventual disposition of every asset into a single, predictable model. And it answers the budgeting question that keeps CIOs up at night. Hardware is straightforward to forecast. The services wrapped around it — warehousing, shipping, repair, end-of-life, the constant churn of devices changing hands — are not. Flex puts a real number on those services and blends it with the hardware, so leaders can finally see the true cost of a device across its entire life. No more guessing. No more surprises.

How do you get real visibility into your device fleet?

To put it bluntly, consolidation solves the chaos. And Insight’s Advanced Asset Management solves the blind spots. By integrating directly with WestJet’s ticketing systems and pulling device health data, the program answers questions most organizations can’t:

• Was the device even turned on? A refresh can ship, get signed for, and still sit in a box, unused and invisible to you, until now.
• Where is it right now? Connections to shipping partners track devices in transit, so nothing disappears between facility and field.
• Is it the right device for the job? Usage data reveals whether a user issued an iPad Pro needs that power, or would be better served, and at lower cost, with an iPad mini.

That last point is where visibility turns into savings. Right-sizing the fleet to real usage means you stop overspending on capability no one uses and get more value from every dollar already committed.

How does Insight handle large-scale, high-pressure refreshes?

In a high-stakes environment, readiness isn’t a metric — it’s the whole game. Flex is built around the SLAs WestJet’s operation demands. Per their request, new-hire devices arrive two days before a training class. When a device fails, a replacement ships same-day from Insight’s facility to arrive the next day, while hot spares wait in the Genius-bar-style Solution Bars at each airport hub for instant swaps. Behind every one of those swaps runs an automated chain: ticket to ERP order, warehouse pull, lab configuration to the exact MDM profile, asset tagging, and a return waybill so the defective unit loops back for repair or responsible disposition without anyone on Craig’s team lifting a finger.

The real test of a partner relationship isn’t how it performs under normal conditions. It’s what happens when volume spikes and timelines compress. WestJet is currently executing a 3,000-device pilot refresh. Craig handed Insight nine separate spreadsheets of users at once — not sequentially, not in manageable batches, but all at the same time. In a fragmented model, that kind of handoff creates bottlenecks, follow-up chains, opens the door to errors, and requires the kind of manual coordination Craig had spent years trying to escape. Instead, the team absorbed it without friction. That’s what a true operating model shift looks like in practice.

What does success actually look like for WestJet?

Fourteen months into the Flex program, WestJet’s measure of success is simple. A pilot or flight attendant powers on their device, their flights and apps are right there, and Craig’s inbox stays quiet.

That’s the outcome we build toward at Insight. Not a transaction, but a relationship. Apple gives WestJet the tools their people rely on. Insight keeps them running. We handle the device lifecycle so you can focus on your operation.

Because in your business, just like in aviation, there’s no pause button. There’s only ready — or not.