Now more than ever, rapid change, good decision support and flexibility are all key aspects of crew management work, both during and following the Covid-19 disruption. Many operators are unfortunately now tasked with finding the best way to scale down, ramp up and manage abnormal amounts of crew training and checks to maintain or modify qualifications, whilst also reducing the exposure to the disease for their crew and others. All this and much more, with quick and frequent (often drastic) changes to the operational preconditions.
Most of the business processes for these operators have been refined and tuned over time towards optimality for a highly competitive market but a moderately changing world. These processes now struggle to cope with the uncertainty and frequency of changes in too many variables simultaneously, and to meet a surging need from decision makers for evaluating 'a ton' of alternatives. Speed is of the essence. Speed in reconfiguring the solutions, in business modelling, but also in producing and evaluating optimization runs to produce needed insights. And this needs to be done ideally with a minimum of assistance from third-party vendors, as they are now over-loaded with requests from their customers.
Some crew solutions cope with a quickly changing world better than others. We are now hearing from our customers that they appreciate RAVE, the ease of configurability, and the optimizers, more than ever. However, the focus has shifted. Pre Covid-19 it was more about hammering out the best possible solutions with a moderate number of extra what-if scenarios. Right now, process automation and high-performance optimizers, together with RAVE and data analytics, come to good use when instead primarily producing a wide range of options of feasible plans, feeding in to the decision making. And even if optimality is of less concern now during a resource surplus - rapid re-planning at short notice has instead become crucial, something almost impossible to excel at if limited to manual planning.
For more information on how Jeppesen crew management solutions support operators not only to quickly and easily react to change, but also for generating promising change opportunities, please take a look at this document titled 'Your Opinion is Interesting, but Optimization Matters'.
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