How Airlines Can Quickly Reduce Costs and Solve Operational Challenges

In the fast-paced airline industry, the ability to make quick improvements that reduce costs and enhance operational efficiency is essential to staying competitive. Airlines want to focus on providing the best service to passengers, not on spending several months going through an RFP or other procurement process for new systems and services. Involving an external industry expert with several years of experience at different airlines, who can provide a new perspective combined with data-driven objective analysis and expertise, will help drive both short-term and long-term change.

That's where Boeing’s Operational Analysis service comes in. As experts in the field, we specialize in providing comprehensive insights and recommendations to help airlines achieve their objectives. Let's dive into how an airline can leverage our services to overcome six common challenges and unlock significant cost savings.

Uncovering common challenges

Lack of collaboration between different phases of flight operations, for example commercial planning and crew scheduling
Dynamic requirements not considered during fleet and tail assignment, such as updated passenger demand, tail specific restrictions and maintenance needs
A missing feedback loop from operations to planning, resulting in the inability to adapt the planning phase to provide buffers at the right places to reduce operational disruptions
Excessively long manual processes, lacking the ability to create multiple scenarios focusing on different objectives in order to choose the best one based on the desired outcome
Reactive fatigue risk management, relying on rigid rules that restrict certain types of rosters and not incorporating the use of bio mathematical models during the planning phase
Ineffective disruption management due to a lack of a holistic view of the current state of the operation, causing an inability to identify potential disruptions as they arise, along with the absence of sufficient support from day-of-operations tools to handle disruptions automatically

Tailored solutions

To address these challenges, we propose tailored solutions that would bring about significant improvements for your airline. Through a combination of on-site engagement with stakeholder interviews, data analysis and expert insights, we provide valuable observations, recommendations and roadmaps for operational improvement.

Observations and recommendations

Highlight strengths and weaknesses identified in your airline's operations, processes and decision-making
Offer detailed recommendations tailored to address specific challenges and goals
Focus on improving operational efficiency, effectiveness and overall performance

Analysis of custom performance drivers

Validate the current objectives, define corresponding KPIs and analyze these custom performance drivers specific to your airline
Identify trends, patterns and areas of improvement through data examination to help prioritize improvement initiatives and guide decision-making

Operational improvement roadmap

Provide a step-by-step plan for implementing recommended changes and improvements
Outline specific actions, timelines and responsible parties
Guide your airline in enhancing operational performance and achieving objectives

Technology roadmap

Offer a roadmap for integrating technology solutions to support operational improvements
Recommend new technologies, system upgrades and platform integration
Align technology solutions with the overall objectives and priorities of your airline

This analysis is done by our experts who have worked at airlines for several years and have seen different types of operations across the globe. All these activities are reviewed with a reference to industry standards and best practices, which allows you to identify peers in the industry with similar operations and establish benchmarks going forward.

The specific functional groups within flight operations that we focus our analysis on are:

Commercial and Network Planning
Crew Planning (Resource Planning, Crew Pairing & Rostering)
Tail Assignment
Crew Tracking & Operations Control
Flight Planning & Dispatch
Additional touchpoint groups including but not limited to Engineering, Fuel Analytics and Airport/Ground Operations

Optimizing flight plans and schedules through our tailored solutions could lead to fuel cost savings of up to US$20 million per year.

Clear outcomes and cost savings

At the end of the on-site engagement, we provide a summary report that includes observations and recommendations, followed by a detailed report based on further data analysis and expert insights. This report serves as a roadmap for your airline to enhance operational performance and achieve its objectives. By using our industry leading tools, we can find quantitative improvements to your airline’s current operation. Here are some of the tools we use to address specific objectives:

Using such analysis, we have shown how:

Using the integrated capability of our Flight Scheduling, Aircraft Routing and Crew Pairing tools improves crew productivity by 3-4% without impacting the overall profit of the schedule.
Using our fleet optimizer, we can consider up-to-date requirements such as revenue and passenger demand, aircraft and station-specific fuel costs, maintenance demand and more during fleet assignment, resulting in a 1.5-1.8% increase in available seat kilometers.
Optimizing tail assignment to consider current passenger booking, tail specific performance factors such as Fuel Bias, updated maintenance needs, operational constraints and more could reduce fuel consumption by 0.5-0.8% and increase maintenance fulfillment, leading to savings of up to US$20 million per year while contributing to environmental sustainability goals.
Using Calibration, we can perform advanced hindsight and insight analysis on the delay profile of the airline along with understanding the block time and turn time stability. Implementing smart buffers can increase robustness of flight connections by 8%, reducing disruptions for both the operation, crew and passengers.
Being able to provide crew with a consistent scheduling process is key to maintaining an efficient operation and ensuring crew satisfaction. One important aspect of this is streamlining the roster creation process by implementing efficient optimizers that consider multiple objectives, such as crew bids, fair distribution of work, fatigue considerations and crew efficiency. By doing so, the time required to publish rosters to the crew can be reduced by more than 50%. This allows airlines to either start the process closer to the roster publication deadline, thereby capturing more changes, or to move it earlier to provide crew with their schedules sooner. This enables crew members to plan their lives accordingly.

About our operational analysis service

In the ever-evolving airline industry, quick planning and operational improvements are essential for reducing costs and staying competitive. With our Operational Analysis service, significant benefits are achieved through targeted solutions. By addressing challenges, implementing improvements and utilizing our comprehensive service, airlines can unlock cost savings, enhance efficiency and pave the way for flawless planning and operations.