Air Traffic Controllers Rostering Software Can Build Resilience in Any ANSP
Increasing Flexibility and Efficiency, While Reducing Workforce Costs and Fatigue Risks
Context
In 2020, the Aviation Industry suffered a dramatic hit, the most significant one in its entire history, due to the COVID19 pandemic. Thousands of grounded planes for months in a row, tens of thousands of job cuts, losses of hundreds of billions of dollars across the entire aviation chain.
Epithets like “critical”, “unprecedented” and “cataclysmic” were used to paint the fateful impact of this relentless crisis. Two months after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic most airlines faced serious risks of going bankrupt, with ANSPs being the second collateral victim of the lack of air traffic, after airliners.
Never let a good crisis go to waste…
…almost became the 2020’s top-performing cliché in any discussion about COVID19 impact, opportunities and recovery.
All major aviation stakeholders, including ICAO, IATA, CANSO, Eurocontrol & Co., have constantly campaigned for close, world-wide collaboration to overcome the pandemic. The conflicting politics & disconnection at the state level, however, acted as a handbrake in the way of any sustainable progress.
It’s up to every decision-maker, in every country, to pull the strings and turn the ship in the right direction, now when the wind is low.
Mr Henrik Hololei, Director-General of the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport of the European Commission, had some encouraging advice for ANSPs at the Aviation StraightTalk organised by EUROCONTROL a few weeks back. When asked by the host, Andrew Charlton, What can ANSPs do in this situation?, Mr Hololei replied:
ANSPs must prepare for the future. Use this crisis, now, when the traffic is low[…], to continue to innovate, continue to install new technology and make sure there are enough controllers available and trained, ready to deliver when there is a need for that.
DG MOVE Director-General Henrik Hololei, Aviation StraightTalk Live @EUrocontrol
And there it goes the opportunity…
Innovation is hard and risky to produce. In the private sector, it takes ridiculous amounts of cash to finance innovation, many rounds of trial and error until you get to product-market fit. And, even then, 9 out of 10 innovation endeavours fail. But not even trying to innovate is the safest road to failure.
How can Air Navigation Service Providers innovate when they need to reduce their CAPEX?
ANSPs can use this crisis as a time-out and rethink their long-term strategy. They need to evaluate their operations, assess their efficiency levels and prioritize investments in areas with potential of high return-on-investment.
Air Navigation Service Providers’ core business is to provide safe and efficient services and, although the ATC systems are heavily automatized, the most important resource is still their workforce. Anything that can improve workforce productivity and flexibility will translate to direct reduction of costs, increased efficiency and resilience.
Problem
Workforce Management, and mostly Air Traffic Controllers Rostering, is still one of the most challenging problems faced by the Planning Managers in any ANSP. Although the advantages of deploying performant ATCO rostering software are obvious, the large majority of ANSPs still use rudimentary planning tools like spreadsheets or pseudo-automated software to schedule their ATCOs on their day-to-day shifts.
From our analysis, the main barriers for the low adoption of advanced workforce scheduling platforms are:
- Prohibitive cost. Most providers of such workforce scheduling platforms are charging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars for a lifetime license. Hardware, installation, training, software updates and long-term technical support — all add up extra tens of thousands of dollars to an investment which the ANSP hopes to cover by using the tool for 10-to-15-to-20+ years. By the time the ROI is achieved, these tools are long time running obsolete.
- Difficult access. ANSPs should be able to trial these platforms and assess the value they bring to their business before committing resources (money & time) to an investment that may not pay off.
- Shadows of the past. There were some notoriously bad experiences ANSPs had with some of these tools in the past, where tens of millions of dollars failed to deliver what has been promised. After being burned with hot soup, almost everyone is blowing on their yoghurt now.
Solution
So, what can ANSPs do now to improve their resilience and prepare for the future of digital workforce management?
- Invest intelligently. All ANSPs should give up spreadsheet scheduling or immature rostering tools, even if their workforce counts a few tens of Air Traffic Controllers. Manual rostering takes time. Adapting the schedule to unavoidable disruptions takes even more time. Overtime (too much workload) and boredom (too less workload) are expensive and fatigue-prone. Manually updating spreadsheets hurts flexibility. The lack of flexibility hurts the overall systemic resilience. This kind of problems can be tackled by deploying SkyRoster as the integrated Workforce Management, Scheduling and Optimisation platform.
- Try before you buy. Before buying a car, we take it for a test drive. When we get a new phone, we can return it in 30 days and get our money back, no questions asked. When we subscribe to Netflix, Dropbox or Office 365, we can use it for as long as we want and close the subscription once we don’t need it anymore.
Why wouldn’t ANSPs benefit from the same advantages when investing in a Workforce Management platform? SkyRoster was designed as a solution to all these problems.
ANSPs can sign up for free to get access to the SkyRoster cloud platform. The onboarding process can be finalized in a few days.
Planners can get proficient in using the tool in a few weeks. ANSPs can evaluate the tool and, once they decide to go-live, they can continue to use the SkyRoster cloud version or request an on-premise deployment, running the platform on their own infrastructure. Pro and cons of these two options will be detailed in a future article.
What does it cost to start with SkyRoster?
Starting with SkyRoster costs $ 0 and a lot of willingness to innovate. We can’t promise SkyRoster can solve all your workforce management and rostering problems. What we do promise is that SkyRoster is free to use until you get real value out of it.
SkyRoster was designed to be simple to use, easy to deploy, yet powerful and extensible, covering the basic staff scheduling needs of 80% of ANSPs. Therefore, SkyRoster is paving the way to the new era of Digitalisation in ATM, with minimum adoption cost and operational overhead for ANSPs around the world.
Do you find it a bad idea to give it a try?
Schedule an online Product Tour or sign up for a free account at https://www.skyroster.com/. Let’s start from there.
