Saving Manchester Airport’s Operations team 300 hours a year

Manchester Airport is third largest UK Airport with two runways and over 100 aircraft parking stands. The Airfield Operations team comprises over 50 permanent staff members, providing essential airfield safety services to nearly 100 airlines and their business partners, 24 hours each day, 365 days each year.

Manchester Airport’s Airfield Operations team, responsible for operations at the UK’s third largest airport, selected BCN Group to develop a bespoke software Safety Management Information system. The existing paper-based safety reporting process that Manchester Airport’s team was using required staff to complete lengthy administration tasks, interfering greatly with the safety issues at hand. Manchester Airport therefore required a solution which shared real-time information about safety performance and potential hazards. This would help eliminate paper-based procedures to ensure rapid identification and response to hazards, to minimise disruption to planes and passengers.

• Elimination of paper-based reporting will save in excess of 300 man hours per year.
• Bespoke software application extends existing Airfield Incident database.
• Enables Airfield Operations team to react rapidly to hazards and minimise disruption to passengers.

The new solution builds on the team’s existing safety systems and intelligently auto-populates the relevant safety forms, improving the management of safety reports and processes which track the implementation of corrective measures. Manchester Airport’s Airfield Operations staff selected BCN Group to develop a solution, ahead of an off-the-shelf package, to meet the organisation’s specific requirements which include stringent airport functionality and design standards. Having worked very closely with the Manchester Airports Group for several years, BCN Group has proven knowledge and expertise of developing bespoke applications that support the organisation’s different business divisions across the entire group.

“Airfield safety is of paramount importance. It is imperative that our safety management systems provide us with data to confirm standards are maintained and continually improved,” commented Radford Taylor, Airfield Operations Manager at Manchester Airport. “We needed a solution that, on the one hand, enables my team to focus their efforts on safety management and on the other hand, opens up our safety reporting scheme to a wider set of staff members. The new system BCN Group developed for us provides a central repository that captures all incident data. And this can now be accessed by a wider range of employees therefore ensuring that suggestions about safety can be captured in a structured manner which delivers improvement.

“The solution’s inbuilt intelligence identifies what level of information is required depending on on the type of report being filed,” continued Radford Taylor. “Alerts are now sent to relevant members of staff who are also able to be an important part of the airport’s safety measures and procedures. This has allowed us to incorporate critical improvements to the way safety is viewed and recognised at the airport. Thanks to the system’s new embedded capabilities, staff can actively record safety observations, enabling the Airfield Operations team to better manage process information and feed through the necessary corrective actions – saving in excess of 300 man hours per year! This results in preventative safety thinking rather than a process of reactive management.”

A key feature of the BCN Group system is that it also ensures that Manchester Airport’s stringent safety requirements are met and that the organisation’s entire workforce abide by mandatory national and international civil aviation regulations.

BCN Group developed a solution that embedded all the necessary information into staff’s PCs, laptops and PDAs so that a wider set of individuals can log any safety incidents and have access to relevant corrective measures.