Everything and everybody at the right place at the right time

With efficient Resource Management this becomes reality

Delays are a nuisance for every passenger and translate into a severe loss of money for airlines and airports. However, departure or arrival delays are frequent and can have many reasons:

  • Queues at check-in counters or security check stations
  • Late servicing of arriving aircraft on blocks
  • Not enough ground handling equipment available
  • Baggage or cargo not on board in time
  • .... etc...

To us, the only acceptable excuse is bad weather – everything else can be avoided or at least reduced to a bearable minimum by careful planning and efficient management of resources serving aircraft and passengers or handling cargo and luggage.

Our resource management systems cater for all three kinds of resources:

  • Fixed space resources such as check-in counters, baggage belts or gate holding rooms
  • Mobile equipment, which is primarily GSE such as highloaders, push-back tractors, stairs and alike
  • Staff, which may be terminal personnel such as check-in agents or apron staff such as loading teams etc.

Efficient resource planning requires a detailed base of data concerning the available quantities of all resources and personnel capacities or capabilities / certifications. In addition, unavailability of resources (either foreseeable such as scheduled maintenance, or sudden such as personnel calling in sick) needs to be taken into account.br /> On the other side, resource requirements of flights have to be determined and stored in the form of demand profiles per event as an additional set of basic data.
Typically, this demand is based on the schedule of events, the aircraft characteristics and the handling contract of a particular airline per typical flight or flight number for a set of destinations/origins.

With this basic data and the flight schedule in the background, capacity requirements can be established early on and matched with resource availability, showing at a very early stage whether there are sufficient resources. If capacity constraints at certain peak times become evident, capacity expansion can be immediately initiated.

A pre-assignment of resources to flights and their resource demands can be established at a very early point in time as well, so that the allocation of fixed and mobile resources to flights over a certain period can be arranged and standardized, while personnel can be assigned to teams and shifts according to demands, qualifications, contractual details, vacation times and even personal preferences, as the case may be.

With such a resource allocation plan, an airport starts well-organized into any operational period – knowing however that changes to the plan can and will occur!

Here the real strength of resource management comes into play: Any deviation from the plan – be it because of changed flight details or because predefined time stamps in the handling profile don’t hold ‑ are detected automatically and the remedial intervention can be immediately initiated.
Since the operators of each resource and the resource managers are connected by automatic call and information exchange devices, changes in resource allocations and status notes can be exchanged automatically and instantly.
If the flight handling profile can not be re-integrated into the schedule, potential effects on other flights can be detected and visualized. This gives the airport authorities the possibility to re-organize the handling of all affected flights in order to minimize the impact on the entire airport and the airlines’ network operations and to avoid a domino-effect of delays, cancellations and disruptions.

Thus, a previously static flight schedule with associated resource allocations becomes a very dynamic pattern of handling profiles with small modifications done at many places and regarding many processes in order to keep overall operations running smoothly.
This not only reduces process costs and waste of resources, it also improves on-time performance and – as a side effect ‑ utilizes capacity in an optimized, flexible manner, which in turn reduces capacity constraints and capacity requirements because stand-by and idle times per resource allocation are minimized.
Optimum resource management may open the possibility to postpone or even eliminate the need for capacity expansions previously deemed necessary (which may be affordable if it’s a question of the number of passenger stairs, but can be very expensive when a terminal expansion is in the discussion.)

So, before a huge capacity expansion is planned, a careful look into whether intelligent resource management might solve the problem is always a good investment!