Challenge

Covid highlighted significant flaws within both Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport’s respective legacy workforce management infrastructures. While separate business entities, both found that they were reliant on unsuitable tools, such as fixed manual clock-in machines and complex series of spreadsheets, to track thousands of staff members across many different service lines.

Given the complexity of this task, such systems could not reliably confirm staff attendance, nor provide accurate data, for either client. These problems continued to persist, and, upon review, both clients agreed with their service provider, ABM, that system overhauls were a strategic necessity.

A specialised workforce management tool was required. Both Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport needed a cost-effective, flexible, and paperless tool to track staff attendance and improve strategic visibility for client stakeholders.

Providing Workforce Management Solutions for Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport

“By digitising the management system and transforming it into a paperless platform, the clients now had a fundamentally faster, more efficient system that provided greater flexibility in how its workforce could be managed.”

Solution

Flexible configuration was a core requirement of the overall solution. Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport worked closely with ABM to find a customised solution that could accommodate their respective operational needs.

The chosen workforce management tool would need to eventually help teams across the client’s business, including cabin cleaning, PRM, passenger bussing, security, VIP services, and warehouse management. Heathrow Airport’s cabin clean team, for example, had different operational requirements from Manchester Airport’s PRM team. Therefore, a standardised approach wouldn’t be able to support them as effectively as a set of customised solutions could.

ABM needed to provide a series of suitable options, each potentially needing to support a wide range of complex operational requirements. Initially, whether these workforce management tools could enable visibility, flexibility, and efficiency were the primary tests.

In collaboration with ABM, Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport decided which tools they wanted to test, localise, and then implement to establish an effective workforce management system to replace their older, fragmented systems. The clients needed a long-term solution, rather than a short-term execution that couldn’t sustain long-term growth.

Jim Niblock, MD for AVI UK&I, and Robert Rabbetts, Aviation Director, worked closely with both clients. Their insights into workforce management were an asset in helping to determine the overall direction for the projects.

As part of the client’s workforce management overhaul, ABM trialled many different software platforms before they chose FindMyShift as the most promising solution. In continuing to work with Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport, ABM implemented two separate pilot schemes at each airport. This approach enabled a more tailored pilot scheme for each client – both to establish benchmarks across different services and to provide a variety of configuration options for the clients.

Alongside ABM, Manchester Airport, which focused on PRM services, and Heathrow Airport, which focused on cabin cleaning services, began testing FindMyShift in September 2020. In addition to testing the attendance reporting and visibility enablement functions, clients were able to learn the best ways to train staff in using the software effectively.

As part of the pilot scheme, functionality implementation was staggered across the client’s operations over the course of several months. This way, they could track implementation progress for different functions, thereby gathering data and testing the efficacy of each feature. Similarly, staggered implementation was useful for learning how best to ensure a smoother transition period for staff, away from old practices and into the new system.

In the first month, it was restricted to attendance reporting and recording subsequent data; the second month, staff were asked to submit headshots; the third month, staff were required to submit location coordinates when they reported attendance, thereby applying a geo-fence along client site boundaries.

Throughout the pilot scheme and afterward, ABM and client stakeholders collaborated to refine and optimise the FindMyShift platform to deliver tailored solutions to each airport. The pilot schemes began with 200 people; now, more than 4,000 airport staff are active users.

As workforce data was collected and organised, clients found that they were able to access personalised data dashboards. With this increased strategic visibility, the clients were able to develop much more agile workforces. Similarly, they were able to access a single centralised location that contained workforce data.

By digitising the management system and transforming it into a paperless platform, the clients now had a fundamentally faster, more efficient system that provided greater flexibility in how its workforce could be managed.

Benefits

• Increased Operational Efficiency: The clients can now access staff attendance data in a far more reliable, centralised, and accurate way; airport staff now have an app-based alternative that they can use on their phone. They no longer need to queue and manually submit attendance reports.

• Site-Based Geo-Fencing Capabilities: Now that location coordinates are submitted by staff, the clients can apply geo-fencing capabilities to their site boundaries. This has reduced incidences of unexplained absences and misreported attendance, as FindMyShift can detect whether attendance reports have been submitted on site.

• Rapid Data Dashboard Reporting: The clients can now access a personalised data dashboard with real-time reporting. This has created faster turnaround times for reports as workforce data is readily available on request.

• Data Visualisation: The clients can now access greater data visualisation options via their dashboards, helping them to perform in-depth analyses and develop additional strategies, with increasingly sophisticated configuration options to support clients in this regard.

• Improved Payroll Accuracy: The clients experienced an approximately 80% reduction in payroll queries, now that payroll calculation efficiency has improved due to faster, better data collection.

• Increased Efficiency for HR Analytics: Sickness data is now readily available for the clients and their frontline managers to manage absenteeism.

• Increased Workforce Agility: Due to greater strategic visibility, the client’s respective workforces are increasingly agile and able to adapt to changing operational needs, such as sudden labour shortages across the client’s rosters. For example, should staff want to work additional shifts beyond their contracted hours, they can bid for empty shifts in the roster using their FindMyShift app.

• Faster Communication: The clients now have a direct method of communication, via FindMyShift, to frontline teams, as many operational staff don’t have access to a personal email address.

• Greater Working Time Directive Transparency: Clients will soon have access to automated alerts for stakeholders, so that potential shift scheduling violations aren’t missed.

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