With help from Ascent, AeroMexico takes to the web to allocate staff

Sophisticated modeling, an international project team, and a willingness to commit to the web all come together to improve an airline's operations.

To succeed in today's service economy, all companies, and airlines in particular, must learn to perform a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, they must raise service levels to build a more profitable customer base. On the other, they must lower service costs in an increasingly turbulent labor environment. This can be tough - especially when the business is hyper competitive and when daily events - everything from bad weather to mechanical malfunctions - can conspire against conducting planned operations.

Take AeroMexico. In 1996, this member of the SkyTeam Alliance and the largest carrier in Mexico faced ever-increasing passenger traffic, over-worked agents, and enormous waiting lines at its busiest airports. Raising the level of customer satisfaction became a top priority. The challenge: How to improve service for a growing customer base with the same number of employees. The solution: Make employees more productive by better matching staff availability to demand. In other words, to always have the right people at the right place at the right time. AeroMexico's strategy was to automate planning (monthly, day-to-day, and real time) of employee allocation against specific job functions and assignments. The airline would replace "rule-of-thumb" style management with software-based processes that analyze and optimize staff allocation in the context of both service level and cost objectives.

To do that, the first order of business was to find out exactly when, where, and how much passengers wanted to fly AeroMexico - in other words, to sharpen the accuracy of AeroMexico's load factor predictions, and to determine when passengers arrived at airports. That required analyzing the arcane data related to arrival profiles and travel plans of AeroMexico passengers. With that analysis underway, AeroMexico also engaged Ascent Technology, Inc., a company whose software is instrumental in running some of the world's busiest airports including Atlanta, London/Heathrow, Toronto, and San Francisco. AeroMexico asked Ascent to implement its SmartAirport® WorkZone workforce manager for several of the airports into which AeroMexico flies. By using the data AeroMexico collected, the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager would make intelligent decisions about how AeroMexico should allocate its employees. But not only did AeroMexico want Ascent's product, it wanted Ascent to host the product for them as well - thus making a company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a day-to-day partner in the operation of one of Latin America's largest airlines.

Satisfactory service at minimum cost

"What we are trying to achieve with Ascent is a model that optimizes the allocation of service personnel at airports throughout Mexico," said Dr. Alfonso Villegas Zuniga, Subdirector of Planeacion at AeroMexico. "Right now we are working in the Mexico City airport, in Monterrey, Cancun, Campeche, and Guadalajara. We have validated the software at Mexico City, the region's largest airport, and we expect transition to full production use by mid-2001.

"We have been impressed with Ascent's dedication to this project," Villegas continues, "and also with the level of support we have received in this ongoing partnership - which we fully expect to broaden in coming years. We looked at a number of providers before making our decision, and none come close to matching the level of business benefit that Ascent does with the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager, especially with its integrated approach to real-time management with planned operations."

One key benefit is an ability to maintain efficient staffing levels of airport ground operations no matter what happens: flight delays, equipment changes, early arrivals, and even the occasional broken jetway. Other factors the software takes into account include sick time, holidays, vacation schedules, overtime, and job rotation. Some employees, for example, receive preference for certain jobs, shifts, and holidays because they have seniority over other employees. There are also assignments considered to be especially difficult (like servicing a 747) that must be rotated among employees. All these factors, and others, must be taken into account for every position that services every plane. That includes ticket counter agents, gate agents, baggage handlers, airplane cleaning crews, and towing crews - basically every employee needed to unload a plane after it has landed, both passengers and baggage, prepare it for its next departure, and refill it with the next flight's passengers and baggage.

Staff scheduling becomes especially onerous when the travel season changes - which happens four times a year in Mexico as vacation travel patterns shift. When that happens, Villegas and his staff must overhaul rosters and personnel schedules to accommodate a bevy of new flight itineraries. "Every time we go through a change in season we have to re-roster the plans for airport personnel," says Villegas. "Flights are canceled, flights are added, and the types of aircraft on different routes change. So, of course, that means that we have to assign staff differently. And in the past we have always done this manually."

Even when airport managers have years of experience, plans done manually can be little more than best guesses, especially when revised at the last minute to accommodate unforeseen events. The result: often flights are overstaffed because supervisors won't risk making passengers late or leaving them stranded. States Villegas: "Very often airport supervisors ask for more people than they really need. This can lead to a very unhealthy negotiation between the supervisors and the top managers who say that the supervisors don't need to operate with so many people. The fact is, neither side really knows if they do or not."

Here's a brief rundown of what the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager can do:

The SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager is a first-of-its-kind product that uses sophisticated queuing theory to compute the number of employees needed to provide satisfactory service levels while minimizing costs. For example, the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager can automatically compute the number of check-in agents needed to keep waiting time or queue lengths below pre-defined levels. While planning shifts, the product blends IBM's OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library), a linear programming solver, with a new genetic algorithm to guarantee "use any time" performance and optimal results.

The SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager automatically produces rosters that are almost always better than handcrafted alternatives and provides considerable relief to operational managers who often have to work hard to keep such rosters up-to-date in the face of continual change.

During real-time operation, the product offers value to the end user by automatically updating plans and redeploying personnel as flight delays and cancellations occur. Irregular operations, such as diversions, are handled through powerful find and solve operations that can be used to proactively fix problems before they become unsolvable.

The product includes a novel scenario-based representation that allows multiple versions of complex labor rules to be fully maintained. This enables planners to conduct easy what-if scenarios and multiple airports to be handled by the same business analyst. Such a capability is especially important both to airlines that need to look at operational staffing costs across the airline and to handling agents that operate multiple airports.

Ascent's SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager operates on top of SmartBase, Ascent's flagship resource database for integrated planning and real-time control of airline and airport operations. It uses state-of-the-art Java GUI technology and can be offered through a browser to employees, business analysts, and operational personnel who need to view, update, and manage personnel information. It offers integration options to connect to enterprise data, such as employee information, flight schedules, load forecasting data, and real-time operational updates.

Hosted in Cambridge

But one thing the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager won't be doing - it won't be running in Mexico. Instead, Ascent hosts the system at a facility in Cambridge. AeroMexico will access the application over the Internet - yet expects the same performance and functionality it would have gained if the system were hosted locally. Reliability and economy should even be enhanced because the application's developers will be working only a short distance away from where the application is running rather than at a distance of thousands of miles. And AeroMexico also avoids the expense of buying and maintaining its own application servers.

"We think it will be more efficient and more economical to leave the application at Ascent," Villegas says. "It's just smarter to have the software where the knowledge is - for support, for maintenance, and to upgrade to new versions. If we have the system down in Mexico, if ever we have a problem it will take longer to fix. Ascent is a day away by air. Once the system is in production we cannot afford to have the system down for even more than one hour. Clearly, when you're talking about an airline, application availability is a huge concern - from both a reliability and a security standpoint. Ascent has obviously demonstrated a solution that more than satisfies our requirements."

AeroMexico intends to use the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager three ways: to generate monthly staffing plans, to update daily rosters, and to respond to daily contingencies - everything from employees calling in sick to flight delays. This ability to both plan ahead and to manage the current situation results in a more cost effective operation and a smoother one as well.

A model program

"One of the key ingredients to effective planning is scenario building," states Dr. Sundar Narasimhan, Ascent's chief scientist, who has collaborated extensively with Villegas's team on the AeroMexico project.

"The product enables airport supervisors to easily conduct what-if scenarios before those scenarios actually occur," Narasimhan says. "They can set up scenarios to model different service levels, for example, using crews of larger than usual sizes to load/unload baggage or clean an aircraft in a pinch, or improving the waiting time for first class passengers for a certain class of flights during certain days. They can then analyze their entire planned schedule for the impact of such scenarios in terms of costs, impact on employee rosters, and so forth. They can also ask the system to plan on using part-time or split-time employees to handle certain operations. The unique value provided by the system is that once such scenario validation is finished, they can smoothly transition the plans into operational rosters and assignments that track operations and evolve as disruptions occur."

The SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager uses IATA flight schedules and receives in-flight positioning information automatically from national air traffic control. That means supervisors don't have to enter this information manually - a chore that could be easily pushed aside in the rush to meet staffing contingencies.

Part of what makes these models work is that they incorporate probability - in other words, they predict the impact that various factors will likely have on work loads at various locations like ticket counters and baggage belts.

"We introduced all three probabilistic models that so we could describe the behavior of how people actually flow through an airport," Villegas says. "We wanted to take into account the arrival patterns and how we are servicing people at our various counters. We also wanted to be able to model the different queues. For example, what would happen if we only have one queue for domestic flights? Or what would happen if we put up a queue for each flight? How would that affect service patterns?"

Finding out whether those probability models work in real life was a priority. To make sure, a project team comprised of AeroMexico and Ascent mathematicians and programmers spent weeks testing them. They used historical airport data from scenarios that already had occurred to see if the program would achieve more efficient staffing allocations than the humans had actually done working with identical data.

One probability problem that must constantly be solved is predicting where a passenger is likely to go to check in, says Villegas. "In Mexico, if you are on a domestic flight, you can either go to the ticket counter at the front of the airport or walk directly to the gate. If you are on an international flight, you must go to the ticket counter first. People will also come to the airport earlier for an international check in than for a domestic check in. They will also arrive much earlier for an international flight that leaves in the evening than for one that leaves in the early morning."

But probability is only part of the story, Narasimhan says. "There's the queuing theory side, but then there's the whole deterministic side - which is to figure out how to service a plane. If you want to turn a plane in 40 minutes, how do you do that?

"There are lots of activities that need to occur - like cleaning, fueling, moving people off the plane, and moving the new people on. All of these activities are intrinsically time bound. For example, you can't deplane 200 people in a second, and you can't clean the plane while people are still coming off. Some activities are intrinsically time bound and some tasks can only happen after others tasks have occurred - in other words, there are both resource constraints and there are task constraints."

A lot of gut level judgment

Classically, how these problems would be handled in the past is by rule of thumb. "Suppose I have a 747 and 737 parked next to each other," Narasimhan says, "and both need to be cleaned. That's kind of a tricky problem. Do I follow my usual practice, which is to send four people to clean the 747 and three people to clean the 737? Or, maybe, because the 737 needs to take off first, should I send five people over there?

"Traditionally, there is a lot of gut level judgment involved. You always hear a lot of conversations like this: 'Joe, I'm buying six planes, how many people will I need.' And Joe answers back, 'Six planes? Well, I'd use the six-people-per-plane rule.' And you say 'But what happens if I drop the service level to three people per plane?' Joe might say: 'I don't really know.'

"Well this [the SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager] system will tell you. The fact is - and we can demonstrate this with the application - by merely changing when and where you deploy your people, you can impact operations drastically. The people you free up from locations where they are not needed can be used to reduce queues at your busiest locations, and that allows you to handle a higher volume than you might have initially thought possible. Furthermore, by using automation to ensure that employees are being assigned fairly, you also are contributing to their satisfaction. Supervisors who are overwhelmed in some of these busy airports really need tools like our system so that instead of doing manual data-entry or tedious manual roster management, they can really take care of their employees and their airline's customers."

Although SmartAirport WorkZone workforce manager functions will be accessible over the Internet, what an employee can access depends on where and who they are. "Planning for all the airports will be centralized in Mexico City," Villegas says. "Once the airports have approved the parameters - such as the rate of passenger arrival to the airport at different hours of the day - we will generate the plans. Then, whenever there is a change in an itinerary we will produce new rosters and new staffing requirements - showing airport supervisors where they need to reduce or increase staffing levels or where they should deploy people to other positions."

Planners in Mexico City will notify supervisors by email when monthly plans and daily rosters become available, which they then can access on the web. To see a plan or a roster, the supervisor merely clicks on a link in the email message. Supervisors can also print out shift rosters and employee work schedules at printers positioned at convenient locations throughout the airport. "Over time," says Villegas, "an employee will be able to check their schedules on a PC."

The fact that these critical schedules will be coming from a vendor's machine located in Massachusetts rather than from an AeroMexico machine located in Mexico says a lot about the airline's regard for Ascent and its product.

"The business benefits of using such a sophisticated product are considerable," Villegas says. "Thanks to the new system, we plan to increase our operations with eight new planes - or 12 percent - in the next year. The product's smart algorithms enable us to pay attention to the quality of life issues that our employees face," states Villegas, while letting us staff up to meet increased load. It pays careful attention to the bottom line, and yet it does not neglect important issues, such as overtime pay, break and off-day times, and training, that are critical to our labor unions."