Knowledge is power, the ancient adage goes. In the information age, it might be more accurate to say data is power.
Data collection is everywhere, which includes ground service providers utilizing data to make their operations safer and more efficient.
Guillaume Crozier, divisional vice president, operations and product development at dnata, says they try to record most of what they do, when and how.
“I'm referring to both quantity as well as qualitative aspects, and also, targeting as many safety and compliance aspects as possible,” Crozier says. “You cannot really manage what you cannot measure, and you cannot improve if you do not measure your level of operation.”
Crozier says the data collected by dnata can be thought of in two ways, lagging and leading. Lagging data might be certain safety and operational data that’s most useful when viewed in a whole over a period of time.
“We focus more and more on building leading indicators with real-time information and relevant checkpoints,” he says.
Crozier adds that dnata has developed a safety hub and mobile app, allowing employees, both supervisory and frontline, to report anything they see as non-compliant or potentially hazardous.
“Anyone can report, any time, if they see something,” Crozier says. “We have offline capability because we don't have Wi-Fi or connection everywhere at all the spots of an airport across the globe. Offline capability is key to cover consistently all our operations. We capture the data live, and upload it to the cloud when we reach an online spot.”
Advances like cloud technology and mobile apps are allowing dnata to transition more and more from lagging to leading data collection.
“The technology evolves. We can increase the number of data touch points,” he says. “You can increase if you have the right tool. You can give that capability to any of your staff, complying staff who can instantly report back something. So that's definitely giving us a much more accurate picture and higher quantity of data, which is really good.
“So, thanks to this, we can improve on planning, be more proactive and sometimes, a bit predictive, which is still very early stage. But using historical data and some machine learning capability that you see more and more today, that's definitely opened some new doors.”
Kris Kristmanns, IT service manager ground handling, Swissport, says collecting data allows the company to better understand variances between forecasting and actual performance.
“The target is ultimately to use the insights gained to reduce that gap. With time, collecting and combining different sets of data will enable us to become even more efficient. In the future, I expect that we will be able to deliver services that are designed based on individual customer needs,” Kristmanns says.
The data being collected by Swissport is mostly volume and timestamp data, granularly down to a flight level, passenger/bag numbers, check-in times, bag volumes and entry times. Like dnata, technological advances have bolstered Swissport’s data collection capabilities.
“The technical changes for ground handling were significant. We have moved from manually collating data in spreadsheets from various sources to computer or handheld supported service,” says Kristmann. “Process and service optimization using information technology has been crucial to Swissport's ground handling business's success that today counts for roughly 80 percent of Swissport's revenue.”
Kristmann says that there is no doubt that Swissport’s processes have become more efficient using computer-based support systems; roster optimization and real-time task assignment have become rule-based and computer-assisted.
“Data exchange is increasingly automated, and baggage handling loading supervision is more and more automated,” he adds.
However, Crozier notes that while technology has reduced the difficulty of data collection, said technology needs be accessible to everyone otherwise the target is missed.
“We have a very diverse team, which is great, but you also need to make sure that this new technology is accessible to everyone,” he says.
Crozier gives the example of baggage reconciliation and tracking technology (BRTS) as not being as ubiquitous as some may assume.
“When you introduce and enforce new technologies such as BRTS, you need to make sure that you take all of your people onto the journey,” he continues.
Of course, an even larger concern around data collection is data security and privacy. Crozier says data security is of critical importance.
He continues that the privacy question is still a newer topic, compared to security, that the industry is exploring.
“It's very dynamic and we are very careful about this. We baseline our processes on the GDPR framework. We invest in resources to make sure that we understand and get it right. We have a DPO (data privacy office), which helps us actually to, depending on the country, depending on the stakeholder, understand the risk and the exposure and define appropriate mitigation rules,” Crozier says.
Securing data is one concern, another is making sure that it is sound. There is always a risk that false data or the misreading of data can creep into the collection and analysis process. Crozier says the best way to avoid these possibilities is to remove as much manual intervention as possible and automate wherever viable. “If you can actually increase interfaces such as API, you reduce the risk of data capture failure.”
The issue can be compounded when an organization is collecting too much data or not putting the data they collect to good use. Crozier notes that if an organization is not properly using the data it collects, it’s a waste of time and resources. Picking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is critical.
“I think it has to be dynamic depending on your project, depending on what's going on. We have a baseline and related KPIs, but then depending on the specific project or context, we need to make sure they’re fit for purpose,” Crozier says.
And as data collection grows with the technology to do so, and more and more organizations begin or expand their data operations, Crozier says its key to stay both humble and agile.
“I think it's very important that every stakeholder can benefit from the big data effort they all contribute to. We think about it as an end-to-end process where data collectors can become analysts and hopefully understand and value better why we do need to collect the right level of data,” Crozier says.
It’s an especially important point for organizations that might be trying to bring a number of existing systems under one technological umbrella.
“We are not necessarily targeting a single global system solution as long as we can collect and structure our data as we need. We become more and more system agnostic and focus more on data sharing,” Crozier says.
It’s more important, Crozier adds, to have clear goals in mind with what to do with the data collected and to share it. Data hoarded by only one group of people is counterintuitive to the goal of data capturing.
“That's going to encourage them to capture even better, more accurately, and they're going to be able to use it. So, they see the why and they see the benefit of it. So, what do we do? We are building up our data we collect in a data lake. And then we make sure that it's not only head office who have access to the data,” Crozier explains.
As the technology advances, so too will data collection and analysis techniques.
“The air transport industry is one of the industries where enormous amounts of data are already being generated. Information about flights, passengers, luggage and cargo are generated in multiple systems as passengers and luggage move from A to B. For Swissport, the next step is to digitalize our business processes further. It is a priority to break data silos and to add analysis and digital solutions on top of the services we are already offering to our customers. As we advance, our customers can expect additional data-driven services and more agile responses,” says Kristmanns.
Crozier predicts that the user experience will increase, along with the data checkpoints, allowing for easier data capturing. He also foresees machine learning and artificial intelligence as an industry game-changer.
“I think that the next disruptive wave which will come actually is artificial intelligence, and we don't know exactly what that means for us in our industry. But it's coming. We see this more and more, and I think that's going to really disrupt what we're going to do,” he says.
