A Cloud, Data & AI Story
Challenge
Given the recent health and safety measures that have been implemented for all public spaces, ensuring that flight passengers can move through airport security as efficiently as possible is perhaps more important now that it has ever been. This will only become more true as the world begins to re-open, with more and more travellers lining up to take to the skies again. Efficient staffing will therefore be vital to the recovery and growth of the airline industry, as airports seek to keep up with evolving security measures and passenger flows.
But the concept of resource optimisation is nothing new. Our client, an international airport, approached us to help them find a way to better forecast passenger arrival times, so that they could optimise staffing schedules to ensure process efficiency. They recognized that having the right staff at the right time would lead to a number of positive business outcomes, including:
- Cost-savings
- Better customer experience
- Increased airport retail revenue
Like many businesses, the airport had been collecting a mass amount of data, but as a non-cloud organisation, they did not yet have a way to turn that data into valuable insights that they could use to find the efficiencies they required.
Solution | Security Screening Optimisation Platform
Based on the airport’s specific challenges, Lixar Fuelled by BDO suggested a solution that would optimise staffing schedules to ensure security line efficiency — a security screening optimisation platform. Understanding the important role data and AI would play in such a solution, we began by introducing the client to the concept of cloud computing, through our Lixar Cloud Adoption Framework.
The Lixar Cloud Adoption Framework is a foundation of technology agnostic guidance and best practices expertise, designed to support many paths to business value, at all levels of cloud maturity. Having determined that the ideal approach would be to build resilient, automated data processing pipelines to optimise staffing schedules in the cloud, we roadmapped an innovation journey with our client to take them from the pre-cloud adoption phase, to being a mature, data-driven organisation, benefitting from a complex data and AI solution. Following a demonstration of capabilities through proof-of-concepts (PoCs), we matured viable solutions into robust capabilities, powered by the cloud and our award-winning HeroPath data platform, which is a scalable and flexible, end-to-end solution designed to drive data and AI innovation.
The final result is a security screening optimisation platform; an AI-driven predictive tool that continuously learns and retrains, to provide accurate predictions for passenger arrival times, displayed on an interactive data visualisation dashboard. The airport uses these predictions to make key decisions about how many lanes to open and how to staff them appropriately. With this solution in place, the airport has been able to save costs on inefficient resourcing, and provide a better customer experience. This has led to an overall increase in revenue, as passengers are now spending less time in lines, and more time frequenting airport vendors of their choice, from choosing gifts for loved ones, to grabbing a meal before a flight.
Outcomes
With the new solution in place, the client has unlocked their digital innovation, taking advantage of the following additional benefits:
- A scalable and flexible architecture that is cost effective and designed to drive innovative solutions
- A continuously relearning predictive AI model with increasing accuracy
- Insights and predictions at a glance with drill-down capabilities for comparisons, historical data, prediction quality details, and more
Conclusion
Leveraging predictive AI is an effective way to not only make your data work for you, but to position yourself for future growth and success. As this project has demonstrated, cloud, data, and AI solutions help people work better, find efficiencies, and solve problems.
Today, we are all looking forward to a time when we can once again hop on a plane to visit a loved one, explore a new place, or have an adventure. That future is fast approaching, and airports want to be ready. Embracing new technologies for innovation and continuous improvement is a critical step forward.
Digital innovation is a journey with many starting points, and many ending points, depending on where you are and where you want to go. You may be in the pre-cloud adoption phase, the early cloud adoption phase, or even in the mature cloud adoption phase; whatever the case, we meet you where you are, and help you reach your destination. To learn more about how the Lixar Cloud Adoption Framework can support your personal path to business value, check out our blog, Unlocking Digital Innovation.
To learn more about how Data Analytics and AI are helping to shape the future of business, join Microsoft and Lixar Fuelled by BDO in our executive webinar, Envisioning, June 29 at 9:00 EST.
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