WestJet
WestJet’s workforce scheduling process takes flight with Microsoft Developer Tools
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Company Overview
Over the last decade, WestJet has grown to become the second-largest airline in Canada with 60 Boeing next-generation aircraft and scheduled service to cities in Canada, the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean.
Business Challenge
In the early days of WestJet, all employee scheduling was done using pen, paper and spreadsheets. This worked well when the largest airports numbered no more than 40 WestJet employees, but proved inefficient and time-consuming as WestJet’s airport department, including baggage handlers, caterers, gate agents, and check-in personnel, grew to 1,300 employees at 24 domestic airports. To complicate matters, self serve check-in adoption via kiosks and the Web, trans-border/international operations, and multiple aircraft on the ground were also increasing. The growing scale and complexity in operations meant more time was required to manage the growing employee base and ensure adequate staff coverage for all operating scenarios. WestJet soon realized employee scheduling could no longer be supported by manual processes.
“Manually planning and scheduling did not provide us with any flexibility, and we lacked the ability to optimize the workforce according to the ever-changing flight schedules. It became increasingly difficult to plan our advanced schedule and day-of-operation processes effectively and efficiently,” says Mike Hafichuk, Director Airports Planning and Support, WestJet.
WestJet’s old system also struggled to accommodate aircraft acquisitions and expansion across North America. The airline was averaging 13 major schedule changes a year with over 20 intermittent minor schedule changes. As a result, a phenomenal amount of time was spent processing each schedule change and adjusting the varied complexities of the operation.
The company also found it challenging to accurately plan and evaluate the employee productivity levels, utilization factors, or cost of operations as there was no centralized view available of all the data.
“Without automated processes and centralized data, it was impossible to accurately evaluate the business, which meant we had no assurance that we were making the best business decisions,” says Hafichuk.
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Solution
WestJet turned to Microsoft partner, Sabre Airline Solutions, for help. WestJet and Sabre Airline Solutions jointly implemented the Sabre® Streamline® Resource Management Suite of products, an integrated end-to-end resource management solution designed to handle the needs of airlines, ground handlers, airports, caterers, cargo handlers and airport-based government agencies. It calculates optimal staff, gate, and ground support equipment levels, generates solutions for complex rostering scenarios, automates employee administration, and offers decision support on the day of operation. The joint implementation involved numerous departments at WestJet, benefited from a team of specialists across both companies, and supported by an effective change management program to ensure adoption and benefit realization.
The solution set has four modules: Sabre® Streamline® StaffPlan™, Sabre® Streamline® RosterMaker, Sabre®Streamline® StaffAdmin™ and Sabre® Streamline® StaffManager™. The StaffPlan system allows WestJet to import flight schedules directly from its marketing scheduling team, analyze the schedules and generate optimal resource levels. The RosterMaker system takes the projected manpower output from the StaffPlan system and converts it into a choice of patterned and patternless rosters. It also allows WestJet to incorporate specific work rules around weekend shifts, morning/night shifts, and the use of part-time employees. This ensures WestJet creates more efficient staff schedules that suit the needs of the employees. The StaffAdmin system automates the handling of administrative processes, such as schedule bidding, as well as scheduling exceptions such as vacation requests, training, overtime and sickness. The StaffManager manager provides day of operation decision support by visualizing real time flight activity, automating task assignment and managing exceptions.
Built using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2003 development system, the entire Sabre Streamline Resource Management Suite is based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Together, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework are designed to help developers quickly and easily build secure, high-performance solutions on an enterprise-ready platform.
“We chose a Microsoft development system to achieve higher productivity and lower cost of deployment. We also benefited from an integrated development environment for our Web, thick client, mobile client and Web service components,” says Todd Iversen, Product Marketing Director, Sabre Airline Solutions. “Since implementing the solution, we are pleased to see time savings, greater productivity and a more reliable, secure and faster development cycle.”
The Streamline product team took advantage of the .NET Framework integration capabilities as it supports applications within a legacy server environment, allowing old and new application components to coexist and collaborate. This enables developers to reuse existing applications wherever possible. Sabre also benefits from the near-seamless integration provided by the .NET Framework, which helps smooth the flow of critical data across the organization.
“The .NET Framework provides us the ability to quickly and reliably build, host and deploy applications, and provides the means in which information can travel seamlessly across managed and unmanaged code. This is has been a major advantage for the Streamline product line as it allows migration to next-generation technology without a total rewrite of existing applications. So from a business perspective it gives the StreamlineSuite excellent flexibility while giving potential acceleration to product development plans,” says Iversen.
Business Benefits
Since implementing the Streamline solution, WestJet has been able to optimize and automate the scheduling process, which has led to increased efficiency and employee satisfaction, as well as significant time and cost savings. The total savings due to optimized schedules and automated administrative processes is in excess of $5 million annually.
“Built using Microsoft technologies, the Sabre solution has improved efficiency dramatically. We can now generate analytics that help us make better business decisions, contributing materially to the bottom line,” says Hafichuk.
Increased Efficiency
With the new solution, WestJet has been able to automate the scheduling process and, more importantly, optimize scheduling. The tool lets users create different scheduling scenarios and study the costs and benefits of each. WestJet is now able to configure the application to evaluate all of the flight schedules and then develop the actual work plan that makes the most business sense.
“We can now create ‘if and then’ situations, allowing us to build scenarios using data such as customer contact time, customer arrival curves and self service adoption rates – it’s that comprehensive,” says Hafichuk.
The new system also allows WestJet to create a variety of shift solutions based on the desired levels of efficiency and employee satisfaction. With the Streamline solution, the company can create a staff schedule that assigns the most efficient shifts according to the work demand, while minimizing headcount and maximizing productivity on a particular task.
“The system can prioritize resources based on cost and it will find the most inexpensive way to properly cover the shift. You can also ask the system to come up with an alternative based solely on efficiency. It’s amazing to have this level of flexibility and choice so we can make the best decisions on our staff plans,” says Hafichuk.
The solution not only creates a schedule with associated costs, it also automates the scheduling process so that paper based administrative processes and schedule exceptions, such as vacation, training, overtime and sickness, are easily accommodated and tracked.
“The automation was the biggest motivation for us, and the software helped us virtually eliminate our manual processes. We've been able to consolidate roles, streamline and reallocate positions, and eliminate things we no longer need to do. It’s making us much more efficient overall,” says Hafichuk.
Greater Employee Satisfaction
To promote fairness and equitability between shift starting times, as well as accommodate days off, it’s necessary for WestJet to create rosters where all employees rotate through the different shifts. The new system reads the output from the StaffPlan system and creates individual shifts based on work rules and employee exceptions, producing a rotating roster that is assigned to employees each week.
“Canada has sophisticated work rules, and fairness, equitability of shifts and days off are of great importance to our people. The new solution helps us ensure that all employees are treated fairly and all employees rotate through the specific number of shifts, without compromising safe and efficient operations,” says Hafichuk.
Another benefit for WestJet employees is the ease of shift trading. Using the Streamline system, WestJet offers a secure, employee-only Web site to help them easily trade shifts, request days off or post available shifts online.
“To do something simple like trade a shift meant an employee had to come in to the airport, complete a paper form and sign off. Then that employee would have to wait for another employee to come in and complete the other part of the paperwork before it would be submitted to an administrator for manual approval,” says Hafichuk. “Now, more than a thousand employees are empowered to find the information they need by simply logging on to the site from anywhere – giving them more control over their days off.”
Time Savings
WestJet has utilized the Sabre Streamline Resource Management Suite of products to develop schedules that are cost effective and efficient, yet still satisfactory to its employees.
WestJet has also reduced administrative time to create the staff schedules. Previously, it took more than a week to process a month of full-time work. Now, it can be completed in a matter of hours. In addition, WestJet estimates the RosterMaker system and the StaffAdmin system has helped the company save approximately 25 per cent in administrative costs by automating the creation of complex rosters and streamlining employee administration.
“With the new software in place, we have saved the equivalent of 30 full-time employees to build and manage staff schedules across our system. We now have a group of 5 individuals centrally located to handle these tasks. That represents over $1 million in back-end labour savings for us, just within one department,” says Hafichuk.
Continued Productivity
Sabre is looking to add even more value for its customers by implementing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework for its next release in October 2006.
“By upgrading to the 2005 version of Visual Studio, we expect to see greater improvements in developer productivity. As well, we hope to more easily integrate new technologies with legacy code, and gain better predictability of our software development lifecycle,” says Iversen.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more information about Visual Studio 2005, go to: msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Sabre Airline Solutions products and services, call (682) 605-1000 or visit the Web site at: www.sabreairlinesolutions.com
For more information about WestJet products and services, call (888) 293-7853 or visit the Web site at: www.westjet.com
