continuous process improvement initiatives for airports, synergy of many approaches.

1. CHAPTER VII: RECENT PROCESS IMPROVEMENT INITIATIVES FOR AIRPORT
MANAGEMENT
7.1 Introduction
There has been increasing pressure for improvements in airport performance through
efficient and sustainable management of existing airport resources. But in order to improve
performance, one should first be able to assess the present status. This has stimulated vigorous
research efforts aimed at modeling all aspects of airport operations and evaluating quantitatively
their impacts on delays and congestion, safety, the environment and the economy at large.
The airport performance assessment is a complex task that requires thorough
understanding of the numerous aspects of airport operations and processes. By definition, a large
variety of performance measures (e.g. capacity, delays, and level of service, safety, security,
emissions, noise, economic costs and benefits) should be considered along with their
interdependencies and trade-offs. The airport decision making process is further complicated by
the diversity of entities processed (passengers, baggage, cargo and aircraft) and the range of
strategic, tactical, and operational considerations that need to be addressed throughout the
airport, from ground access to the terminal airspace.
7.2 Historical Developments in Process Axis.
Since the dawn of industrialization there have been continuous efforts by managers to
maximize productivity by improving processes. In pursuit of better management systems
primitive approach was to focus on man behind the machine. Most initiatives were aimed to
motivate the worker and train him better to increase productivity. As the complexity grew, these
efforts reached saturation and couldn’t produce desired results. Focus thus shifted on the
processes to increase efficiency and productivity. Early initiatives were very basic and
highlighted need for clear job description and performance monitoring systems. Slowly they
evolved into complex computer aided systems which controlled and monitored all the activities
and were the binding soul of an enterprise. Some of the most common Process Improvement
Initiatives being used world over by Airports to enhance their productivity are as given below:

2. i) Best Practice Benchmarking
ii) Total Quality Management (TQM)
iii) Balanced Scorecard
iv) Business Process Reengineering
i) Quality Management Systems (e.g. ISO9000/BS5750or similar)
ii) Business Excellence Model / EFQM
iii) Value Based Management
iv) Malcolm Baldridge Award
7.2.1 Best Practice Benchmarking
It is the process of comparing the performance of any airport, measured in several ways,
with that of the best in the Region. It is a relatively new process, which was developed to help
manufacturing industries increase their productivity. With the globalization of the airport
industry, individual airports are increasingly being compared on a worldwide basis. It is time to
apply benchmarking to airports to improve their processes and also compare their performance
objectively. The Benchmarking Process involves four basic process steps as given:
1. Identification of key indicators of performance or capacity;
2. Selection of comparable facilities worldwide;
3. Collection of the relevant data;
4. Objective Analysis of the data and the consequent ranking of the facilities worldwide.
Benchmarking is easy to comprehend, but difficult to implement. Data are difficult to
obtain, and are often not fully comparable when available. Physical characteristics which one
might think are obvious and easy to count or measure requires much effort and time. More subtle
characteristics of airports, while potentially more interesting, are likely to be much more
difficult.
7.2.2 Total Quality Management (TQM)
In the mid 1940s, Dr. W. Edward Deming developed Total Quality Management. It is
defined as a continuous effort by the management as well as employees of a particular

3. organization to ensure long term customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Guidance to
management under Total Quality management can be divided into four categories:
 Plan
 Do
 Check
 Act
It is also referred to as PDCA cycle.
Planning Phase
Planning is the most crucial phase of TQM. In this phase process owners have to come up with
their problems and queries which need to be addressed. They need to come up with the various
difficulties they face in their day to day operations. Process owners are required to do necessary
research and collect relevant data which would help them find solutions to all the problems.
Doing Phase
In the doing phase, process owners develop a solution for the problems defined in planning
phase. Strategies are devised and implemented to overcome the challenges faced by them. The
effectiveness of solutions and strategies is also measured in this stage.
Checking Phase
Checking phase is the stage where people actually do a comparison analysis of before and after
data to confirm the effectiveness of the processes and measure the results.
Acting Phase
In this phase process owners document their results and prepare themselves to address other
problems and continue this process all over again.

4. 7.2.3 Balanced Scorecard
It is a strategic planning and management system which is used extensively in business
and industry worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization.
It improves internal / external communications, and monitor organization performance against
strategic goals. It was originated by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David
Norton as a performance measurement framework that added strategic non-financial
performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more
'balanced' view of organizational performance.
It has evolved from its early use as a simple performance measurement framework to a
full strategic planning and management system. It transforms an organization’s strategic plan
from an attractive but passive document into the "action plan" for the organization on a daily
basis. It provides a framework that not only provides performance measurements, but helps
planners identify what should be done and measured.
7.2.4 Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
It is the practice of rethinking and redesigning the way work is done to better support an
organization's mission and reduce costs. Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the
organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions are asked, such as
validity of the existing mission and its strategic goal alignment. During the process of rethinking
customer focus is maintained. An organization may observe that it is operating on questionable
assumptions and may not be aligned to the wants and needs of its customers. Only after the
organization rethinks what it should be doing in the light of changed business environment, does
it go on to decide how best to do it
BPR is suited for organizations, whose business processes are usually fragmented into
sub-processes and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the
organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process.
Many a times it so happens that results are not achieved, but individually all the sub processes
were satisfactory. Reengineering maintains that optimizing the performance of sub-processes can
result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is
fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For this reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing
the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and

5. their customers by synergizing the whole process repeatedly. This initiative for realizing
improvements by fundamentally re working how the organization's work should be done,
distinguishes it from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental
improvement.
7.2.5 Quality Management System (QMS)
It is a process-oriented quality and operations-management system. It assists in all
Airport operations, from the handling of lost & found and deviation reporting to how to conform
to the Regulator’s rules and regulations.QMS ensures a process-oriented way of working, by
providing optimal conditions for quality assured operations.
The ISO 9001:2000 standard deals with Quality Management System (QMS). It
emphasizes commitment from the Management to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting the
applicable regulatory requirements and to continuingly improve its performance in this regard.
The ISO does not regulate or authorize certification bodies but are left to the States. In India,
Quality Council of India (QCI) has been entrusted with the responsibility of accreditation of
Certification Bodies (CB) as Auditors' and also Training for this scheme. The Bureau of Indian
Standards (BIS) is a member of the Technical Committee for developing the ISO standards. The
Quality Council of India has different Boards under it, namely, National Accreditation Board for
Certification Bodies (NABCB) and National Accreditation Board for Auditors' and Training
(NABAT) for the purpose. All airports which use the guidance material of ISO to enhance the
overall quality of operation and exhibit it periodically to the auditors gets ISO-9001-certified
airports tag.
7.2.6 European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM)
The EFQM Excellence Model offers a holistic view of the organisation, highlighting its
strengths and opportunities to improve. It is often used as a benchmarking tool and shows how
an organisation compares to its competitors and other leading Airports. It can also be used as a
management tool; it will help set the performance and competency objectives of the organisation.
The EFQM Excellence Model, consists of 9 criteria and 32 sub-criteria, which break down
organizational management into fragmentation that may result in self-assessments lacking
integration and focus. It can be used as a strategic evaluation tool as well.

6. The 4 result areas focus on what's important to the 4 key stakeholder groups (Business,
Customer, People, Society).At the simplest level, the Model is a cause and effect diagram. If we
want to achieve a different result, we need to change something we do within the organisation.
This Model provides a framework for understanding which actions we need to initiate in order to
achieve the results we want. Standards considered excellent today will only be considered as
adequate tomorrow, there is a continual improvement loop, feeding back the learning from the
results achieved and using creativity and innovation to drive increased value for all the
stakeholders.
7.2.7 Value Based Management.
VBM is different from other traditional planning systems. It is not a staff-driven exercise,
but focuses on better decision making at all levels in an organization. It recognizes that top-down
command-and-control structures alone cannot work well, especially in large multi business
corporations of today. Instead, it propagates managers to use value-based performance metrics
for making better decisions. It values managing the balance sheet as well as balancing long- and
short-term business perspectives.
VBM can best be understood as a convergence between a value creation mindset and the
management processes and systems that are necessary to translate that mindset into action. In
isolation, either element is insufficient, taken together; they can have a sustained positive impact.
A value creation mindset means that ultimate business financial objective is to maximize the value;
that managers have clear rules for deciding when other objectives (such as employment or
environmental goals) outweigh this imperative; and that they have a solid analytical understanding of
which performance variables drive the value of the company. Managers must know, whether more
value is created by increasing margins or by improving revenue growth, and they must ensure that
their strategy focuses resources and attention on the right option.
7.3 Recent Developments in Airport Process Improvement
Last couple of decades has seen tough competition amongst Auto manufacturers. Auto
companies like Toyota and Honda have significantly increased their market share at the cost of
American Auto makers. This has led to much focused campaign in American and European

7. academia to highlight the causes for the same. Many of these studies have flooded the process
improvement domain with Japanese terms. These studies have also produced many
“copy approaches” in the shape of Six Sigma approach and Lean Management. Some of the
most popular process improvement applicable specific to airport industry are as given below.
7.3.1 Total Airport Management (TAM)
Introduction
Total airport management is the operational process-control of the whole complex of
aircraft-related ground management. Main stake holders are thus all types of support
organisations operating on the airports' air side functions which are involved in handling the
aircraft during arrival, departure and on the ground. In the beginning, the land side functions of
an airport (e.g. passengers, cargo etc.) are not included, although they could be included
subsequently when its implementation matures. TAM Performance-based airport operations are
required for a future performance-based ATM system as prescribed by SESAR for EURO
CONTROL. Similar systems are being proposed in Asian region and KLIA (the Kualalampur
International Airport) has already implemented the salient subsystems of TAM.
The concepts of TAM aim at an integrated airport management, where all stakeholder
processes - landside and airside - are conducted using a common data set. Furthermore, an option
for increasing the throughput is to optimise the airport operations. Nowadays operational
improvements concentrate mostly on single solutions, consider short term planning and are
implemented in a piecemeal manner. Stakeholders at the airports often do not realise the impact
of their actions on other stakeholders in an integrated environment. And quite often they do not
know how other stakeholders react in a given situation. These uncertainties and complex
interactions, especially in highly specialized and isolated aviation environment, have negative
impact to the efficient overall use of stakeholder’s resources. TAM basically provides a holistic
approach towards optimisation of Airport assets by better coordination of process improvement.
The process
TAM concentrates on the planning phases of the day of operations using the most
accurate information available. The spatial scope of TAM is the entire airport, while taking into

8. account additional information available through communication networks and also surrounding
airports. TAM is introducing an environment wherein stakeholders are given the possibility to
maintain an Airport Operations Plan (AOP) by having access to all related information in layered
architecture. The AOP will be created through different planning systems depending upon the
scope and density of operations at the target Airport. The flight plans, airport parameters, key
performance indicators, stakeholder preferences, agreed goals and dynamic and static constraints
are all integrated for access by different stakeholders in holistic view and automated rules can be
created alerts for intervention.
The core element of the TAM management layer is the AOC (Airport Operation Center).
AOC enables various stakeholders to jointly organise and coordinate their activities under the
full situational awareness and impacts of joint decisions on their own and others’ operational
plans. The AOC can be either a centralised physical control room or a distributed solution,
connecting stakeholder representatives by existing and new means of supporting IT tools for
joint collaborative decision making.
Benefits and improvements of implementing TAM12
Implementation of TAM invariably results in increased efficiency and productivity of the
airport operations because of proactive reaction on upcoming bottleneck situations and
restrictions and better coordination of all the stockholder activities. As TAM is a system of
systems its implementation leads to better decision making by stakeholders based on increased
situational awareness .It also leads to enhanced predictability of the traffic flow at the airport
which results in optimum capacity utilization of capacity.
7.3.2 Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) 13
Airports suffer from having a limited number of stands from queues on the runway, late
or inaccurate information to passengers and insufficient use of capacity during adverse
conditions and taking a long time to recover from these conditions. The problem is getting worse
due to ever increasing growth in traffic demands and inability and difficulties faced by airports to
enhance capacity.
12 Total Airport Management by Dr. Henning Hartmann at https://www.eurocontrol.int/eec/public
/standard_page/proj_CARE_INO_I_Total_Airport.html
13 http://www.euro-cdm.org

9. Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) is one of the solutions developed to
overcome these problems by improving the predictability of events and optimising the use of
resources. Its foundation is based on cooperation between the many partners involved in flight
operations at an airport. It helps in resolving unstructured problems of heterogeneous groups.
The Airport CDM concept is divided in the following significant Elements:
(i) Information Sharing
(ii) Milestone Approach
(iii) Variable Taxi Time
(iv) Pre-departure Sequencing
(v) Adverse Conditions
(vi) Collaborative Management of Flight Updates
Benefits
A-CDM is the concept which aims at improving Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management
(ATFCM) at airports by reducing delays, improving the predictability of events and optimising
the utilisation of resources. It brings shared advantages for the air traffic management (ATM)
network as a whole.
Network Manager at such airports have access to more up to date and accurate
information leading to better network planning whereas the airport operator gain by improved
use of stands/gates. More accurate arrival times and planning leads to Better use of resources for
the ground handling agents and the aircraft operator get improved awareness about the
status and location of the aircraft, more accurate fleet predictions. Thus by achieving overall
efficiency because of collaboration the passenger benefit due to reduced delays and probability
of missed connections, better reliability on flights meaning improved customer satisfaction

10. 7.3.3 SITA Day of Operations BI 14
SITA (Business Intelligence) solution provides a dynamic view of your airport
ecosystem at a strategic and operational level. Using this unique, cloud-based BI portal,
managers can view critical data to monitor, measure, and predict daily airport operations. This
software solution can turn data into knowledge to improve operational efficiency and the
customer experience Focus on what matters: business drivers and their performance. Various
components of this proprietary solution are:
i) Operations Analyzer. It provides Analytics to measure airport operational
performance and insight into flight-related operations, including planned versus actual
arrivals and departures, resource utilization, on-time performance, and operations trends.
Powerful and fully customizable, it offers enhanced statistics and historical analysis.
Operations Analyzer provides vital decision-making support for airport management
teams that have to maintain service standards while managing continuous growth,
deviations from plan, and frequent irregular operations
ii) Flow Predictor. It provides highly accurate passenger flow forecasts for the
next 24 hours, enabling proactive management of the airport environment and provides
real-time predictions of operational flow challenges. Forecasts are generated
continuously, always using the current situation in the airport, and reflecting any change
within minutes when updating forecasts.
iii) Common Use Analyzer. Its primary function is to collect and analyse
common use data. Airport management’s ability to implement improvement initiatives is
restricted due to lack of access to daily operations and historical data. With Common Use
Analyzer, airport operators can analyze report and benchmark passenger movements,
getting a deep understanding of relevant activities.
14 Overview 3/30/2016 SITA 2/4 at www.sita.aero/solutions-and-services/solutions/day-of-
operations-bi

11. iv) Queue Analyzer. Passenger comfort and convenience is adversely impacted
with long queues at security and bag carousels. Queue Analyzer monitors and predicts
queue-times at key airport chokepoints, allowing airport operators to proactively allocate
resources and staff to improve operational efficiency and the passenger experience.
Combining historical and real-time data with powerful algorithms, Queue Analyzer
delivers highly accurate wait-time predictions for future. It also provides automated
metrics for performance, trending, and service level reporting. The results can be
displayed in real-time to passengers on screens, websites, and mobile applications.
v) Flow Analyzer. It analyzes passenger flows by departures, arrivals,
transfers, and visits across all facets of the airport. Leveraging historical and near real-
time data, Flow Analyzer uses powerful algorithms to deliver accurate flow patterns,
dwell times, and path analysis reports and statistics. Combined with flight data, Flow
Analyzer can also segment passenger flow by airline, extending brand and digital signage
value by path.
vi) Data Explorer. It provides fast access to data so that airport managers can
make more informed and faster decisions. Data can be explored from many angles,
analyzed with different query types, and displayed using various graphical
representations.
Various Benefits of this proprietary solution are improved decision making and
operational performance and improved airport experience for all stake holders. It also Increases
non-aeronautical revenues and helps management achieve reduced wait-times.

12. 7.4 ICAO guidance on performance management.
ICAO has provided guidance on airport performance management in two documents listed
below. In these documents, ICAO recommends that States ensure that airports have performance
management systems in place, and that those systems include one or more performance
indicators in four specified key performance areas.
ICAO’s Policies on Charges for Airports and Air Navigation Services (Doc. 9082). It states that
“performance management is an important management tool for providers, users and regulators”
and recommends that States ensure that providers develop and implement appropriate
performance management systems that include:
i) defining performance objectives with the purpose, as a minimum, to continuously
improve performance in four key performance areas (KPAs), i.e., safety, quality of
service, productivity and cost effectiveness, it being understood that States may choose
additional KPAs according to their objectives and their particular circumstances;
ii) Selecting and reporting at least one relevant performance indicator and its target for
each of the KPAs selected;
iii) Using the results to evaluate and improve performance; and
iv) Undertaking consultations with users and other interested parties to achieve a mutual
understanding and consensus, where appropriate, on performance objectives, level of
performance targets and plans to achieve the targets.”
ICAO’s Airports Economics Manual (Doc. 9562) 6, currently being revised, includes guidance
on establishing a performance management system, descriptions of the four KPAs listed above, a
list of several Performance indicators (PIs) for each of the four areas (without a detailed
description of the individual PIs), and a discussion of benchmarking.