Background

SITA is the world's leading provider of global information and telecommunications solutions to the air transport industry. With over 50 years experience, they offer a total service to around 740 air transport industry members and around 1,800 customers in over 220 countries and territories.

In 1984 SITA saw the enormous benefits of developing a system to enable airports to better utilise check in facilities by reducing the need for airline-dedicated areas. Their Common Use Terminal Equipment (CUTE) facility enables airlines to share passenger terminal handling facilities, such as check-in and boarding gates.
Even though the equipment used is generic to the system, the airline is still able to access their own host EDP application for specific duties such as departure control, reservations, ticketing, boarding pass and bag tag printing, from any terminal.

The potential savings of implementing CUTE are realised as airports become increasingly congested. By sharing check-in and gates the space usage is optimised for the airport and the costs to the airlines decrease. Also it allows an airline to automate its check-in and departure control when the costs of implementing its own system could be prohibitive.

Solution
 

ESP.co.uk was chosen as SITA’s preferred systems support vendor for Gatwick in 1999 and has seen the implementation grow from SITA’s CUTE Lite solution on a single zone to an airport-wide CUTE implementation on over 640 workstation locations.

Managing a 30 minute to fix SLA, 24 hours a day, over such a large site required precise management and fix rates of over 98% within SLA soon became the norm.  However it soon became apparent that the numbers of faults per workstation were higher than would normally be expected for a site of this size.  ESP.co.uk began a proactive program to discover the reasons behind the high numbers of faults and with a carefully managed program of asset control, priority management of workshop repairs, preventative maintenance and trend analysis the numbers of in-service failures were reduced to levels below those seen at any other sites of this size.

Dave Marshall of SITA commented:

“In June 2001 before we started the proactive program to see if we could manage the number of faults down and stop faults before they happened our monthly faults per workstation indicator was 2.01, 1224 faults for the month, averaging about 40 faults per day.  In June 2002 it was 1.51 and in June 2003 it was down to 1.13!!  In real terms this means that in June 2003 the site experienced 527 less faults than in June 2001, averaging about 18 faults a day less.”

“That's 18 faults a day that will not disrupt our customers' customers, 18 faults a day that will not have the potential to cause a flight delay, 18 faults a day that will not have the potential to compromise our SLA with our customer and 18 faults a day that the maintenance team will not have to attend to, leaving more time for them to attend to proactive activities.”

To find out how you can benefit from the ESP experience call 0118 916 9300 now or send an e-mail to sales@esp.aero

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