As the airline industry continues to struggle back to profitability, new and creative options are being analyzed to lower costs and increase efficiency. One area of tremendous focus is airport provided ground handling services. In most cases, airports have the ability to deliver superior service at much lower costs than any individual service provider. Additionally, airport provided services produce a competitive advantage for the airport and can actually serve as an air service development catalyst.
Two of the most important factors in airport provided handling services is ensuring high quality and reasonable cost. Quality and cost are essentially dependent on efficient staff deployment. The art of scheduling and delivering the proper mix of personnel creates tremendous demand on scheduling managers. Often critical decisions need to be made under extreme pressure and responses to changing schedules are required instantly. AirIT’s SMS™, or Staff Management System, supports the decision-making task by enhancing your ability to efficiently deploy personnel.
The SMS™ handles the scheduling and deployment of ramp personnel to allow for the most effective ramp operations programs. Similar to AirIT's RMS program for allocating immobile resources, SMS™ uses a graphical user interface with Gantt style bar charts and "drag and drop" techniques.
This friendly user interface allows the staff allocation manager to quickly and effectively issue ramp work orders and identify possible conflicts and resolve them effectively. Because SMS™ is integrated with the airport operational database, the system automatically takes into account flight delays and updates the ramp allocation charts automatically.
