Kernel Software’s resource management systems can simultaneously increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction and bring under control the complexity of labor rules. Kernel Software’s systems enable Lufthansa to save millions Euros each year. Its Realtime Preferential Bidding systems improve the daily lives of TUIfly and Condor crew-members. Eurostar board personnel is planned using Kernel Software Saas suite, including automatic pairing and roster generation. Extension to Thalys personnel in 2022. KERNEL’S SOLUTIONS OVERVIEW Resource Management is the business process by which the utilization of scarce resources is planned and adapted to the disruptions in the operations/production environment. Scarce resources can be qualified personnel (ranging from the pilots of an airline to instructors of a ski school or to train controllers) or expensive equipment (e.g.: heavy-duty machinery, aircraft flight simulators, etc). In many cases, existing IT systems only track resource utilization. Deciding which resources should be assigned to which tasks, reacting when tasks are changed or when resources become unavailable, taking into account the personal wishes of those who perform the work, all this is left to the ingenuity of the planners. Kernel Software develops systems which uniquely improve Resource Management by supporting the planners in these most difficult aspects of their work. Improvements come from innovations in key areas: - Automatic planning - Rostering - Employee satisfaction - Real-time requests - Smartphones - Legality checking AIRLINES Kernel Software’s systems enable Lufthansa to save millions Euros each year. Its Realtime Preferential Bidding systems improve the daily lives of TUIfly and Condor crew-members. CASE STUDY: LUFTHANSA "By providing its crew-members with an excellent crew request system, Lufthansa was able to create a win-win situation, for the crew-members by increasing their influence on their rosters, and for the shareholders by generating considerable cost savings for the airline using a dramatically-reduced crew planning cycle. Today, the rosters of Lufthansa 15,000 flight attendants are built less than 15 days before operation, with a satisfaction ratio exceeding 90% for the two main requests. "This outstanding improvement of our crew planning processes could not have been achieved without the real-time Preferential Bidding System and Automatic Rostering System from Kernel Software." Stefan Wendlandt Management Cabin Staff Communication, Training and Development Deutsche Lufthansa AG In the jargon of airlines, a roster is the monthly schedule of a crew-member (a pilot or a flight attendant). It describes the flights of the crew-member, his rest days, his vacation days and his training activities. Lufthansa has approximately 20,000 crew-members. Each month, it faces the gigantic task of building an individual roster for every single crew-member. Each roster must obey hundreds of pages of rules described in German and European regulations, in the contracts between Lufthansa and its crew-members, and in a number of additional agreements resulting from discussions with the trade unions. Additionally, rosters must be planned close to the average number of flight hours in order to reduce overtime costs. It is crucial for Lufthansa to match the size of the aircraft used to operate a flight to the number of passengers it expects on that flight: using too large an aircraft is costly, using one which is too small wastes a profit opportunity. However, Lufthansa operates in a market that has become extremely volatile and difficult to forecast. Further complicating the matter, the aircraft type and expected number of passengers determine the number and qualifications of the crew-members on a flight. Once a flight has been inserted into the roster of a pilot, it becomes very difficult to change the aircraft type because pilots are qualified for a unique class of aircraft. As a result, Lufthansa needs to build the monthly rosters of its crew-members as late as possible. Now, building rosters as late as possible raises two issues: The first issue is that building rosters is a truly difficult task. In most airlines, planners need more than 5 weeks to complete it. Reducing this time to 2 weeks is far from obvious. Secondly, crew-members like to know as early as possible what their monthly roster will look like, so that they can plan their personal life (one has to remember that, in the airline world, week-ends are not special days). They were not asking for late planning. The solution to these two issues is based on two systems developed by Kernel Software: The first one is ACA (*), a tool capable of building rosters automatically. ACA performs in a few hours a task that used to keep several planners busy for a week. The second one is MPG (**), the real-time request system used by Lufthansa crew-members to request their rest days, the rotations they would like to fly and the dates on which they would like their training activities to take place. It gives Lufthansa crew-members more control on their rosters, thus compensating for the late building of the rosters. The benefits of the compressed planning cycle that ACA and MPG have made possible are not limited to considerable cost savings. They have also greatly increased Lufthansa ability to react to major disruptions, and significantly improved the robustness of a critical business process. (*) Automatic Crew Assignment (**) Mitarbeiter Plan Gestaltung (elaboration of the rosters by the crew-members) RAILWAYS Eurostar board personnel is planned using Kernel Software Saas suite, including automatic pairing and roster generation. Extension to Thalys personnel in 2022. A COMPREHENSIVE SUITE Kernel Software offers a comprehensive suite for the planning and dispatching of railways personnel, working from multiple stations under a variety of contracts and qualifications. Optimizers using powerful Artificial Intelligence techniques automatically generate pairings and personal activity plans. The suite covers a full range of features: check-in, payroll preparation, swaps between crew-members, requests for vacation or off days, reports, etc. ""Since January 2016, Momentum has used MPG@Rail to plan and track its personnel onboard Eurostar trains. MPG@Rail has made it possible to coordinate the planning of crew-members based in Paris, Londres, Bruxelles and Amsterdam. With the help of its automatic tools, planning activities that used to require weeks of labor are now executed in a matter of hours. MPG@Rail generates individual rosters whose quality is greater than the quality of manually-planned rosters, especially with respect to labor regulations, company-specific agreements and informal rules. MPG@Rail has strongly reduced the workload of the Crewing & Dispatch department, who are enthusiastic users. MPG@Rail reliability is excellent; its deployment, including the migration of data previously scattered in three separate systems, was achieved on time and within budget."" Camille Dargelos Head of Operations - Momentum Services Ltd o Railways o Trains & pairings o Personal schedules o Automatic Pairing Generation o Swaps o Check-in / check-outs o Payroll o Excel interfaces o Hotbackups