NeuroPie Solutions

Airport Performance Management (APM)

The requirement of Airport Performance Management is to provide a common language to realign fragmented functional areas with a strong vision. Such an alignment makes sure that continuous improvement initiatives are more balanced and motivating, since impacts on profit and other objectives are widely understood. The result will be that formerly hidden profit potentials can be realized on the bottom line and a the processes are more customer-aligned.

Much of today's airport performance monitoring originates from a time, when the airport's role was different and collaboration between airport partners rarely happened. Airports were managed primarily from the infrastructure perspective, and operational processes were under control either by the hub carrier or the major ground handler. With a change of an airport operator's role, a review of the key performance indicators must take place.

  1. Current metrics are insufficent: for example, the departure and arrival punctuality is a metric with major shortcomings. Cancellations are not considered, there is no distinction between long and short delays, the number of passengers affected is not included and reasons for delays are not obvious.
  2. No overview and lack of shared understanding:  Even though modern airports have a lot of data and reports in their management information systems available, they usually have no clear picture of how their operational processes contribute to the company’s overall success. Costs are budgeted and managed separately from revenue and quality levels.

Our approach is based on the Total Performance Management (TPM) seminal ideas of Volker Heitmann and is used in areas where success is largely dependent on internal and external suppliers.

With TPM, airport managers from different organizations do not have to agree on business models or strategies: they just have to agree on how to measure end results using as few measurement categories (Key Performance Indicators) as possible. Debating targets is much easier than debating strategy!

What counts in performance management is the result. The process owner is completely free in designing his processes, provided the result remains satisfactory.

A prominent example of a Zoom Indicator in the terminology of TPM is the passenger hour key figure (Pax-h). Passenger hours represent a customer’s wasted time from the beginning of the value chain to its end. This includes everything from waiting at check-in to waiting for a delayed flight and waiting for delayed baggage.

Pax-h can replace many fragmented key figures that have traditionally been steering the operational processes, like percentage of on-time flights, length of check-in waiting line, cancellation rate, and baggage delay. They consolidate the whole time issue of airport management into one single figure. The whole amount of Pax-h represents negative value, its reduction can give a competitive edge. It provides a much better basis for definition of improvement measures than traditional key figures like percentage punctuality.