Case Study - Schipol International Hub

BACKGROUND

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is the main international airport of the Netherlands and the fifth busiest airport in Europe in terms of passengers. The airport is built as one large terminal (a single-terminal concept), split into three large departure halls.

Schiphol opened on 16 September 1916 as a military airbase, with a few barracks and a field serving as platform and runways. When civil aircraft started to use the field (17 December 1920) it was often called Schiphol-les-bains. The Fokker aircraft manufacturer started a factory near Schiphol airport in 1919.The end of the First World War also saw the beginning of civilian use of Schiphol Airport and the airport eventually lost its military role completely.

The related issues that involved in this case are indicated as below :-

• Baggage handling is the second most important factor in having a pleasant trip

• $2.5 billion worth of mishandling baggage in the industry every year (source: 2009 LATA CATS survey).

• Effecting 51 million passengers travelling through Schipol airport alone

OBJECTIVES

• Achieve 1% maximum loss of transfer baggage (against the initial 22 million lost baggage)

• Increase capacity from 40 to 70 million bags; and

• Reduce cost per bag without increasing wait time

Question 1 : How many levels of complexity can you identify in Schiphol’s baggage conveyors network?

There are four layers of complexity each of them is intermingled with others. The layers are given as below:

1. The first level of complexity with Schiphol’s baggage conveyors network is where the bags are moved from check in area to departure gate. There was less coordination between software and hardware levels (e.g. conveyor belts, scanners, security checkers, etc.)

2. The second level of complexity is at the level where the bags are moved gate to gate the place where the bag are handled by human support and aid the work (e.g. human baggage handlers) and also human-to-human relations (e.g. security officer with conveyor technician).

3. Third level of complexity is at movement of the bogs from the arrival gate to the baggage claim where owner claim their bags from the security officers and conveyor technician.

4. The fourth and last level of complexity is to plan and control peripheral Hardwar and software handling area where the conveyor network is large and intricate.

Question 2: What are the management, organization, and technology components of Schiphol’s baggage conveyors network?

Management

1. Setting the goal: right bag must be at the right place on right time

2. Allocating human resources: in every level of conveyor there must be available human resources to control, manage and handle the bags.

3. Allocating financial resources like they have invested over 1billinon in last 10 years

4. New product development such they are going to introduce new baggage handling and controlling system to handle huge bags in every year.

5. Try to introduce new service offering and technology to give better services

Organizational components:

Like every organization in Schiphol’s baggage conveyors network is made up of different department. Each department contributes to the running of the business. The most common departments are:

• Marketing & Sales

• Finance

• Human resource

• Information Technology departments

• Production Department

Technological Components

Technological components of Schiphol’s baggage conveyors network consists of Destination Coded Vehicles (DCVs), Automatic Bar Code Scanner, Radio Frequency Identification Tags, and High Tech Conveyer Sorting Machine.

Question 3: What is the problem that Schiphol is trying to solve? Discuss the business impact of this problem?

The problem they are trying to solve is the mishandling of baggage in Schiphol’s baggage conveyors network. They are trying to increase efficiency of their baggage handling system network. There is huge business impact of this mishandling of baggage in their baggage conveyors network such as loss of $2.5 billion for industry with annually affect 51 million passenger travelling through this airport.

Question 4: Think of the data that the network uses. What kinds of management reports can be generated from that data?

Data items of circulating across Schipol Conveyor Network comprise of four items are scheduling data; hit/failure reports; delays; usage information. All of this data was designed to allow plotting of cost-per-baggage reduction progressions.

Conclusion

—Based on this case study we can conclude that the management of Schiphol International airport has driving the major effort to increase baggage processing efficiency and capacity on the strength of intelligence routing and optimization