Airport Operations Qualifications

SITUATION

Our client lacked an automated approach to assign qualified personnel to perform mandated aircraft maintenance consistently. Safety-sensitive tasks were assigned manually to maintenance crew members without proper employee qualification and proficiency records checks. This led to unsafe practices which were against government regulations. In a single year, there were 78 aircraft damage incidents that were correlated with a lack of proficiency by the ground crew providing maintenance; these events incurred out-of-service costs of $6.3M. They wanted to create a tool to automate checking qualifications and help improve their proficiency training.

SOLUTION

Apex assembled a team of consultants in the U.S. and in our Mexico Delivery Center to work on this project. Our team created and designed qualification definitions for designated safety-sensitive tasks. Following this, they utilized a cloud-native system for the automated management of qualifications and safety task performance. The team then integrated the new system with existing client applications. They standardized the appropriate number of employees for each task in each hub to reduce the client’s training footprint, which helped remove the risk of personnel being assigned to jobs for which they were not qualified.

Client representatives make a request for services through a mobile app to get recommendations for agents based on the flight number. The system identifies the qualified agents from that flight’s crew and suggests prioritizing agents that need to perform the task before they lose their qualification. After every task execution, the system credits the agent and updates qualification records.

RESULTS

The cloud application we created mitigates safety risks and reduces the potential for employee injury. Additionally, the reduction in aircraft damages, delays, and out-of-service aircraft account for incredible potential cost savings. We implemented the application in multiple airports across the U.S. and tested it for implementation at other candidate airports. The infrastructure we developed is foundational for real-time resource exception management systems the client is working on and supports long-term cost reduction by mitigating the need to re-train agents.