Breaking down silos to get the bigger picture
With tight turnarounds, multiple stakeholders and over 300,000 fuel deliveries a year, SLCA needs fine-tuned logistics to keep airports running like well-oiled machines.
“Even the most basic process, such as attending to a parked aircraft, requires a lot of up-to-date information in order to avoid delays,” says Antonio Molina, IT Director at SLCA. “We need to refer to real-time flight information, then use that to define the time slot available for us to service the aircraft, get the fuel to the plane and take the pilot’s electronic signature when the job is done.”
SLCA had been using three applications to keep its operations moving and ensure that all relevant information is up to date. These applications covered three critical business functions:
- Fuel management
- Resource planning for accounting, sales and purchase processes
- Asset and vehicle maintenance, as well as incident, audit and training management
But the data for these applications was kept in separate systems. Analysing it involved manually extracting data from the various sources before running calculations to create unique research reports. This was inefficient for continuous analysis, easy referencing and reporting.
In addition, if a flight is delayed, airports look to identify the reason behind the delay – a process that can take place several days after the flight. On average, SLCA oversees more than 800 flights every day. Its previous reporting process meant that it couldn’t always defend its operations with detailed, comprehensive data. It needed faster, more responsive and authoritative analytics.
The aircraft ground handling industry is a latecomer to the cloud. One of our main challenges was to direct ground operations at airports toward internet technology, and we're proud to be one of the industry's leading companies worldwide in unlocking the power of cloud technology.
– Antonio Molina, IT Director, SLCA