There are a host of flight safety procedures that must be performed before you, as a passenger, can even sit down in your airline seat, and probably have never given any thought to. Specifically, every airline is obliged to address the legally established safety regulations applicable to aircrafts. Before every flight and at pre-scheduled times, every aircraft is subject to a variety of different inspections and maintenance operations. In practice, aircraft maintenance carried out by the maintenance department is a time-consuming affair for airlines. This also applies to one of the leading airlines in the Netherlands, a Déhora customer.

The time-consuming nature of aircraft maintenance

Aircraft maintenance, as well as scheduling the maintenance work, is definitely no walk in the park. That’s why you, as a planner, must take several factors into account. Remember the 4 Ms: manual labour, material, means and methods. All of these must be in the right place at the right time. What’s more, the planning department is required to be incredibly flexible. This means that a significant part of the day-to-day work involves constant and last-minute changes to work activities that have already been planned. Another aspect of this job is the requirement to report all these changes. ‘So much time goes into this, time that could be spent more efficiently by employees. Déhora offered us support in this improvement process, which led to fantastic results!’

Increased efficiency by automating the reporting process

The airline requested Déhora’s expertise for several different personnel-related objectives and factors. For example, support was needed for drawing up basic schedules. In addition, the airline wished to set up smarter, more user-friendly planning processes.

Déhora’s consultant, Marco, succeeded at offering them the assistance they required. He was able to develop excellent new basic schedules that met the customer’s wishes. He was also able to automate several processes that had been carried out in the past manually, and which were especially time consuming and labour intensive. By developing a special tool, rather jokingly called ‘The Marco Tool’ internally at the customer’s offices, employees can now quickly and easily draw up reports and make changes to the reports when needed. A positive result is that by using this tool employees now have more time to focus on other work procedures. In the situation as it is now, the department spends less time on secondary issues and is now better able to focus on the content of their work, the creation of a smooth personnel planning. This improves work quality and increases the effectiveness and efficiency of each employee.

Part of Marco’s work is to also analyse the current data. ‘Marco fulfils the role of Labour Time Management specialist. However, on top of this, he also works as an analyst. He contributes significant added value in this role.’

‘His analytical skills and critical perspective on issues help him provide new insights. Insights and expertise we didn’t have in that area.’

Does your planning process suffer from similar bottlenecks?

Are you inspired by this Best Practice and would you like to know what options are available for your organisation? Please contact us at any time. We would be pleased to stop by for a visit.