Airlines must continually make tradeoffs that affect flights, crew, ground staff, customer experience, and profitability. Unfortunately, these tradeoffs are often based on siloed information. KLM and BCG’s fully customized, in-house solutions constantly measure real-time performance and offer decision-support around a single source of truth in data. This approach enables front-line operations staff to see the full picture and make informed, consistent, and data-driven decisions with a clear sense of how they will play out across the network.
Some notable products include:
- Pathfinder: A best-in-class schedule optimization tool, which empowers airlines to optimize their fleet and tail-assignment processes for robustness and cost in the days leading up to operations
- Sentry & Runway: Two disruption management tools for the day of operations, which resolve major and minor operational disruptions for flight and crew schedules, and help minimize delay costs and disruption for passengers
- CrewVision: A long-term cockpit and cabin crew resource management and planning tool, which calculates an optimal crew plan for the future, including hiring, training, and attrition
- Terra: A tool designed to improve the resource allocation process for ground resources on the day of operations (DoO)—taking into account available resources, equal distribution of workload for employees (employee satisfaction), delay probability, delay costs, and enhanced task times based on a number of factors, such as actual load
Proven Results
The implementation of these solutions has led to improvements in KLM’s operations across functions, from boosting airline operational efficiency to enhancing airline disruption management to data driven integral resources planning. KLM has reduced non-performance costs and increased in value delivery within operations and delivered a strong ROI on the initiative. Staff at the Operations Control Center and other operational and network departments are performing with new levels of engagement, insights, confidence, and satisfaction.
Since the partnership’s last extension in 2021, KLM and BCG have expanded their tailored solutions to other airlines. Today, the KLM-BCG partnership serves a prominent network of carriers of all sizes, business models, and geographies—such as point-to-point, single hub, and multi hub—and for both full-service and low-cost carriers.
Our Partnership with BCG continues to be one of the building blocks supporting KLM operations that bring value to our customers. Thanks to the continuous extension of our suite of tools and the KLM in-house capabilities that we have built up in recent years and our world class people, KLM was able to derive a lot of value from its Operations Decision Support set of tools. KLM is excited to continue to innovate and improve through this unique cooperation with BCG.
We are thrilled to extend our partnership with KLM. Together, we have cemented our position as a leading player in digital airline operations over the past six years. As the needs of airlines evolve, we are excited to continue engaging and innovating with the world’s leading carriers and supporting the digital transformation and optimization of their operations.
