Ground Support Worldwide - 11

INDUSTRY EXPERT
COLUMN:

accepting shifts. Wemple also saw ground
crew scheduling software as one way to
reduce flight delays and boost profitability.
Gaining consistent reporting and a common employee roster were critical for the
airline to better analyze whether it was
deploying equipment and people optimally
for day-of-operations. While Piedmont's
staff management software takes day-offlight schedules and generates work assigned
to employees, without a platform for a common shift, there was no way for Wemple's
team to use its staff management software's
capability for bringing in data for employees
on duty.
Piedmont relies on its staff planning
software, among other systems, to forecast
and adjust staffing levels - e.g., Piedmont
typically schedules four to seven employees for each aircraft on the ramp - to meet
multiple load-factor assumptions. American Airlines' headquarters regularly creates
proposals for future flight schedules and its
team brings those proposals into the staff
planning software to run the proposed flight
schedules against the ground handling staff
requirements to come up with headcount
for each Piedmont location. The airline's
planning and support team takes flight
schedules and inputs data from Piedmont
location managers and creates a utilization
plan aligned to a budget and operations.
The staff planning software systems help
prepare operations from a staffing perspective by looking at the headcount Piedmont
needs and the times of day. That takes the
air carrier to a suggested work schedule.

An Automated Ground
Crew Scheduling Solution
Empowers Workforce

After internal analysis, Wemple happened
to be at an industry conference where he met
a JetBlue manager and asked how the airline was handling staffing issues. Wemple
learned they had a software suite for staffing
called ARCOS RosterApps.
Piedmont did its due diligence and implemented ARCOS RosterApps for a subset of
its 72 locations to generate a schedule based
on the different work groups across ground
handling. The software also gave Wemple's
team a near-systemwide look at how bidding
on work was aligning with flight schedules.

Over a few years, the developers of
ARCOS RosterApps expanded the platform's capabilities and Piedmont rolled out
the software systemwide to integrate it with
the software systems for flight operations
and day-of-operations. With the rostering
solution in place, Piedmont had a consistent
source for decision-making about how the
airline deployed ground handling personnel.
What's more, local managers were able to get
away from using Excel spreadsheets and an
Access database, which Wemple described
as "a complete hodgepodge."
Now when headquarters develops a
schedule, Wemple provides that to his local
operations groups and they fine tune it for
what works best for them. The schedule
isn't fully optimal at that point. Wemple's
team then puts the schedule, along with
the requisite workplace rules, into ARCOS
RosterApps for employees to bid on. With
the employees' preferences locked into the
software suite, the planning and support
group can help the airline analyze schedules, and see potential shortfalls or overages
in staffing and skills, two to four months
in advance.
Wemple's planners can parse schedules
by work groups or skills and quickly see, for
example, if too many people are scheduled
to run baggage, while there aren't enough
to load or unload bags. When the team
spots imbalances, they help local managers
understand and ask if an adjustment on the
planning side might need to happen, possibly creating a new shift bid.

Real-time Analysis for
Shifting Needs

According to Wemple, staff rostering software has reduced the complexity of scheduling for management and administrators
while also ensuring employees aren't working too many hours or consecutive days. The
ground crew scheduling platform also verifies that ground handling staff meet the

Photo courtesy of Piedmont Airlines

GROUND HANDLING

minimum work hours during a given time
period.
Wemple says verifying that the right
people are in the right place is practically instantaneous. Previously, it could
take local managers a couple of hours to
check every time. The management of the
employees' schedule is now in the hands of
the employee.
Having the flexibility to trade shifts for
personal reasons or take advantage of free
travel is a hallmark of the industry. Taking
the process from bulletin boards to a worker's hand can be seen as a perk that improves
employee satisfaction and retention.
The planning and support group now
uses ARCOS RosterApps regularly to analyze, for instance, a current bid for a station
by looking at coverage hours and comparing
future flight schedules and plane requirements by overlaying the two and seeing the
variance. If they note a variance, they can
alert operations and suggest a new bid. This
would shift coverage, so the station avoids
being understaffed.
By quickly filling shifts with the right
people and equipment on the tarmac, Piedmont can get planes into the air more efficiently.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bill Perry, a business analyst for ARCOS LLC, writes about the people and industries
using resource and workforce management solutions for shift scheduling and automatically planning for all types of planned and unplanned events. He can be reached
at bperry@arcos-inc.com.

OCTOBER 2019

AviationPros.com

http://www.AviationPros.com

Ground Support Worldwide

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