Tafawuq Transportation is part of Tafawuq FM and is a business addition formed to target the specialist critical Facility Management market of Airports, Ports & Transportation Projects.
1. "Monitoring and Control
of Service Activity"
During the previous week Tafawuq FM’s airport Facilities Management scrutinisers began to analyse
seven questions, one from each participant. However, Q1: How many services are associated with airport
facility management? The question caused consternation, followed by enthusiastic debate; consequently
we decided it is time to introduce the participants: Asif, a senior procurer; Mary, the PA supporting
Tafawuq’s transportation division; Ray, a studious heavy machinery engineer; Anthony, Tafawuq’s soft
services specialist; Sam, an assistant FM responsible for hard services; Ahmad, an fervent operations
planner and Valentina, who instigated the scrutiny team; all of whom are facilitated by Stuart, Tafawuq’s
Director of Operations.
Continuing with Q1 it was Ray who prompted a discussion that highlighted a range of machinery to be maintained
within an airport environment. He included air-conditioned passenger loading bridges, generating systems,
centrifugal chiller units, baggage handling system, UPS systems, ground handler equipment and waste
compactors, activating a debate between himself, Sam and Ahmad, until Stuart pointed out that the list compiled
in response to the question had not been completed. Mary who has been heavily involved in the development of
Tafawuq’s Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) system, the SAP CAFM Module, produced a list that
contained several significant activities, she considered relevant to the provision of facilities management in an
airport environment. It was obvious that since the last session she had given Q1 much thought. Her list comprised
of monitoring & control of all service activity; helpdesk operations; performance monitoring of in-house and
service provider personnel; communications and reporting; quality assurance; information management; asset
management and project management. Mary’s introduction momentarily triggered mayhem, the participants all
wanting to have their say, forcing Stuart to intervene stating that each of the items should be explored
independently.
Monitoring & control of all service activity
AVIATION AND FACILITIES MANAGEMENT THE AIRPORT
info@tafawuq.ae, www.tafawuq.ae
A lengthy and lively discussion resulted in Valentina preparing the following:
Monitoring & control of all service activity comprises of a number of distributed and firmly-coupled services,
which are orchestrated to accomplish a series of tasks. An airport service request/alert can involve multiple
services, where services invoke other services to offload functions of incoming requests/alerts. When a customer
interacts with a service, it expects certain levels of quality of service guarantees based on Service Level
Agreements (SLA's). These can be expressed as interaction authorisation policies, and service performance
based policies. However, it was declared that the main challenge is that it is difficult to trust all of the services in
a service composition and assume they are delivering as expected. In addition, the details of the services
involved in a service request/alert chain are usually not exposed to customers. Moreover, service interactions
beyond primary service may share data with unauthorised services and contravene client's policies. However,
without an active monitoring and control system managed by CAFM, the customer has no means of identifying if
a contravention occurred and has no control or visibility on interactions beyond its trust domain. Such
interactions introduce new challenges which are not present in traditional systems. Therefore, in order to provide
high assurance and ensure the enforcement of SLA's in real-time, a monitoring framework is required that can
inspect the services dynamically during their execution.
Hence with CAFM, if a service is compromised or fails, the service monitor can discover why the activity failed,
provide feedback and take remedial actions. Furthermore, CAFM provides a data-centric approach for
preserving asset control within FM responsibilities. This approach transforms passive data into an active entity.
It enables dynamic data dissemination decisions and protects service delivery data throughout its lifecycle.
Stuart, satisfied with the discussion and result, halted the session, advising the scrutinisers that all of Mary's
suggestions would be explored during the next session.