IMPROVING GROUND HANDLING SERVICES THROUGH MONITORING
OPTIMISING AN AIRPORT IT INFRASTRUCTURE
Achieving increased transparency and improved communication thanks to process monitoring and the integration of a B2B gateway
Enterprise interoperability
Transparency at individual process interfaces enables departments and service providers to collaborate more seamlessly
Reduced handling times
Handling times have been shortened, thus reducing disruption to flight operations
Process optimisation
Ground service handling and other sectors could be improved by monitoring SLAs
Integration and networking
The integration of individual IT systems unifies the entire company in one network, so that events can be monitored and data can be visualized in easy-to-understand reports
The project at a glance
THE CHALLENGE
A ground services and cargo handling company has the strategic goal of becoming the go-to single-source service provider for the aviation industry. To that end, they are constantly driving innovation in key areas of the industry, such as service, quality and reliability. A prerequisite for further improvements was increasing the transparency of several cross-divisional processes through integration and networking, so that all areas involved could communicate seamlessly. Also, ground handling services had to be optimised in order to monitor irregularities in process flows.One challenge was to enable a fluid collaboration with different service providers and their respective IT systems. These differed not only internally, from department to department, but also externally across airports. On top of all this, uninterrupted operation had to be guaranteed throughout the project.
OUR SOLUTION
The project described here was implemented as a multi-stage showcase project. The main component was our process event monitoring tool edpem, which was used to monitor all ground service processes. To guarantee short aircraft handling times, the critical path in the process flow had to be measured and monitored – especially at the point where the process is handed over from one provider to another. Thus, edpem was deployed to monitor and log a range of events, such as parking/break-set, deboarding finished, cleaning started/finished, catering started/finished, fuelling started/finished, crew on board, loading finished. It also allowed our customer to track and monitor Service Level Agreements (SLA) to identify and improve reasons for delays, among other things.Ground handling services were optimised by measuring service times and detecting irregularities in the process flow. However, the system did not only monitor classic EDI processes, but also visualised reports to facilitate reporting and enable faster decisions. The results were impressive, both in the shortening of handling times and the reduction in disruptions to flight operations.
