Managers at Busy Zurich Airport Use Microsoft Platform to Gain a Clear View of Operations

When Swissair, the largest carrier in Switzerland and owner of most of the Zurich Airport service contractors, went into bankruptcy, the Swiss Federation hired airport infrastructure and operation company Unique to take over. The people at Unique were ready to do more than just maintain the airport as it existed. They envisioned an international showcase of how a busy facility can be operated in a highly coordinated, efficient manner to deliver the highest-quality service.

"We had an opportunity," says Andrea Baroni, who stepped in as the new head of airport operations, "to rethink how a complex operation like an airport can be managed."

Business Challenge

After the departure of Swissair, service contractors from food suppliers to baggage handlers dispersed to different owners. This left dozens of critical business operations involved in daily operations at the airport with little coordination or management.

The situation threatened the quality of service at one of the busier airports in Europe, where travelers stream through in annual numbers more than twice the nation's population. To ensure the viability of the airport, the Swiss Federation granted Unique a 50-year concession to oversee operations. Unique has about 1,200 employees, while its approximately 1,300 airport business partners employ more than 20,000 people.

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Solution

"We had this idea of creating a system that could give a high-level overview of what was going on all over the airport on any day, at any time," Baroni says. "It needed to link together information from many different systems. These included five separate enterprise applications, some of which did not communicate with each other."

Baroni and his colleagues could visualize a potential solution. What they couldn't do was find readily available software to provide strong management tools that would conform to transportation industry standards of performance management and business activity monitoring systems.

So they decided to build and deploy their own application, which would provide at-a-glance overviews of critical airport information such as passenger forecasts, flight data, environmental conditions, baggage loads, management summaries, and live reports that could be delivered with attached documents.

Two Microsoft Certified Partners, NeuroPie and Zühlke Engineering, helped Unique build and deploy this solution.

Together, Unique and its partners chose Microsoft .NET, the Microsoft Web services strategy, which uses software to connect people to information, systems, and devices. People at Unique and its partners used Microsoft software and technologies to create a visually rich, high-performance software suite called ZEUS.

"Our main concern when creating ZEUS was the integration of all the different kinds of data," says Adrian Boss, Unique's chief information officer. "The system has turned out to be one of the most reliable in the airport. That makes it much easier for me to go home and go to sleep at night."

The Zurich Airport solution is based on these Microsoft programs and technologies:

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Business Benefits

With its use of Microsoft .NET software, Unique realized the following benefits:

Smooth integration of existing systems. One of the challenges of system integration is to do it an a smooth, intelligent way so that the person in front of the monitor isn't presented with ten applications to navigate and manage. ZEUS, a smart client application, solves this problem by helping integrate technologies. The smart client software resides on computers around the airport and provides access to real-time information from the ZEUS database, which is fed information from other data systems scattered around the airport. ZEUS combines the various information streams into a single, easy-to-use interface that is as easy to update as a Web site.

Streamlined operations and business processes. ZEUS collects data from the airport’s various systems and provides a graphical representation of the current status at any given moment. For example, Unique's people can see an outline of a specific airplane moving around the airport and even what kind of aircraft it is, such as a Boeing 757 or an Airbus A320. Managers can zoom in on any plane, move the mouse pointer over it, and then see a pop-up balloon of information about the flight. It is also easy to get information on a range of other activities at the airport, such as on-time arrival statistics or the status of baggage operations.

Anytime, anywhere access to information. The ZEUS uses security-enhanced Internet connections to make information accessible to people who need it regardless of where they are. "I use all of our operational databases, including from my home or from places where I am visiting, just to make sure that I'm always aware of what's going on at our airport," says Josef Felder, chief executive officer of Unique.

Improved collaboration with partners. ZEUS technology has transformed the way people at Unique and the airport's 1,300 partner companies work together. With information on key aspects of airport operations so readily available to Unique's people, a partner's activities—and its level of performance—become more clearer. It is easier and faster now to see how well a particular operation performs, or how a failure to perform efficiently affects overall airport operations. This motivates everyone to resolve problems quickly.

Accelerated insight and decision making. Unique's people can monitor passenger loads and act to prevent bottlenecks before they occur. They can also get live warnings about problems and locate precisely where those problems originated.

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