Newsletter for Media Representatives
Hot Topics
Lufthansa Systems’ new NetLine Fleet Assigner optimizes capacity planning
Smart aircraft allocation for increased profitability
Airline planners constantly face the problem of assigning an aircraft to a route or flight without knowing whether the number of seats suits actual demand. Even a route with a rather homogenous demand situation may be influenced by trade fairs or sports events, vacation periods or public holidays. As a result, flights could be half-empty or overbooked. In both cases, the airline faces a financial loss, either through high operational costs not covered by passenger revenues, or through foregone revenues due to a limited number of seats. Now, airlines can achieve a new level of planning efficiency with the latest Lufthansa Systems optimizer, the NetLine Fleet Assigner. For several years, Lufthansa Systems has been offering its NetLine/Plan Strategic Fleet Assigner and the NetLine/Sched Tactical Fleet Assigner. The NetLine/Plan Strategic Fleet Assigner is used in the very early planning stage to calculate a standard week for a schedule that is two periods ahead. It optimizes the capacity distribution across the entire airline network to yield the highest possible overall profit. The NetLine/Sched Tactical Fleet Assigner is used at a later stage. During the last few months before departure, this optimizer also follows the goal of maximum profit through optimum capacity allocation. However, valuable information such as detailed booking figures and forecast data is available at this stage and allows for a more precise planning and optimization.
The new NetLine Fleet Assigner replaces the two individual solutions, combining strategic and tactical fleet assignment. This increases the level of automation, and it also speeds up the process. Yet, its greatest advantage is the use of one database for all calculations, so that results of earlier optimizations can be seamlessly taken over for the next steps. The NetLine Fleet Assigner performs capacity allocations quickly and thoroughly, considering passenger demand. It also features an automated maintenance planning function. It identifies suitable legs for aircraft swaps, reducing costs and increasing revenues. The financial advantage of this solution is beyond any doubt.
A recent benchmark study showed that a mid-sized airline can boost its profitability by up to 600,000 euros per month through the NetLine Fleet Assigner. This substantial amount can be achieved by processing forecast passenger numbers on an O&D (origin and destination) basis, combined with estimates for revenues and operational costs. A high-speed algorithm generates multiple scenarios and shows optimization options based on a flexible rule framework.
Lufthansa Systems has developed the new NetLine Fleet Assigner in association with Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways. As one of the leading airlines in Asia, Cathay Pacific is known for its expertise and high quality standards. Users of the NetLine Fleet Assigner will benefit from this fruitful collaboration, which is based on excellent airline management and long-standing technical know-how. In addition to the NetLine Fleet Assigner for strategic and tactical fleet assignment, Lufthansa Systems provides the NetLine/Sched Swapper solution which can be used until a few days before departure to swap individual aircraft among flights if capacity gaps occur. Both fleet assignment solutions are part of the NetLine airline resource management suite. As an integrated platform for network planning and control, it captures all aspects of the planning process through its modules NetLine/Plan for long-term planning, NetLine/Sched for schedule development, NetLine/Ops for operations control and NetLine/Crew for crew management.
EasyMain drives down airline IT costs
Innovative all-inclusive package for application lifecycle management from Lufthansa Systems
When airlines work on spending less money for their IT, they are not just looking for ways to save money for the acquisition and implementation of new solutions. They know that around two-thirds of all costs over an application’s lifecycle will go toward its operation, maintenance and continued development. This means high costs and employees being tied to a large extent to routine tasks. To tackle these expenses Lufthansa Systems has developed the innovative service package EasyMain. EasyMain covers all aspects of application and service lifecycle management. It includes all of the services needed to guarantee the stable routine operation, regular maintenance and continual development of an application. It is an all-inclusive package, which offers clearly defined services and service levels as well as straightforward fees. This dramatically reduces administrative effort on the customer’s side. Along with the complete lifecycle management for their IT applications airlines profit from the extensive experience the Lufthansa Systems experts have with high-availability systems.
EasyMain is an outstanding example of how outsourcing certain tasks to an organization of specialists set up precisely for this purpose can generate significant cost savings. Airlines opting for EasyMain can achieve significant cost savings. For some customers, IT costs have been reduced up to 20%. For one of its customers, Lufthansa Systems currently manages over 50 applications based on a variety of technologies, some of which are business-critical and must be available 24 hours a day. Each application is assigned to a team of experts with the necessary technical and process knowledge. In the event of an incident, this team not only promptly rectifies the error and restores the system to full operability; it also looks into how to prevent such an incident from reoccurring. This process of continual optimization creates a win-win situation for the customer and for Lufthansa Systems as well. One important aspect of this service package is that it can be tailored to the customer’s requirements. While one customer may only need basic maintenance and operation services at defined times on workdays, another may choose around-the-clock full service with on-call technicians first- and second-level support and application consulting services for the highly critical applications, and just stand-by support for the less important ones.
back