Case Study 2: Schiphol International Hub

Case Study 2: Schiphol International Hub

-          Case study summary

Schiphol Amsterdam airport is Europe’s fourth-busiest airport. Handling about 50 million passengers and 1.5 million tons of freight per year. It is often ranked among the world’s best airports by the Skytrax passenger survey. Producing that sort of quality 24 hours a day, seven days a week imposes high demands on the infrastructure and services, including Schiphol’s network.

According to a 2009 LATA CATS survey. Moreover, mishandled baggage is a $2.5 billion problem for this industry every year. Annually affect about 51 million passengers travelling through Schiphol airport alone.

This case study is to realize a monumental 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.

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

There are 3 levels of complexities for Schiphol’s baggage conveyor network: fist is 21kilometers of transport tracks, 6 robotic units, and 9,000 storage capacitors, (No extending the system with more surfaces)

Schiphol's involved gigantic baggage conveyor network that includes 21 kilometers of transport tracks, 6 robotic units and 9000 storage capacitors, all behaving as one system. Extending the system with more surfaces is not possible given the land conditions surrounding the airport. The baggage conveyor network goal is to have the right bag must be at the right place at the right time.

-          What are the management, organization and technology components of Schiphol’s baggage conveyor network?

Management

1.    Allocating financial resources, such as they invested over 1 billion in last 10 years

2.    Allocating human resources which related to every level of conveyor must have available human resources to control, manage and handle the bags.

3.    Setting the achievable goal.

4.    Introduce more new service offering and technology in order to achieve better services.

Organization;

1.      Management and the employees to be working toward the same vision. Such as training all employees from the earliest stages of the project, and doing so in the most hands-on way possible.

2.      Separation of business process/operation. When the customers arrived at check in desk their bags are tagged. The tags contains the flight information/bar code/FRID that all of the computer in the baggage handling system can read. When computers in the system scan the bar code/detect the RFlD, they process the information it contains and determine where to send your bag. After being scanned (at least) once, the system always knows where the bag is at any point, and is able to redirect it based on three parameters: (a) time of its flight; (b) priority: (c) size.

3.      Unique business process. Such as driving a major effort to increase baggage processing capacity on the strength of intelligent routing and optimization.

Technologies;

1.      Improve networking and telecommunication technology.

2.      Plan and control peripheral hardware and software wide variety of sensor, actuators, mechanical devices and computer

-          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 increase efficiency in baggage handling in the Schiphol International airport, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Mishandled baggage is a $2.5 billion problem for industry every year and this problem may annually affect about 51 million passengers travelling through Schiphol airport alone.

With the new system, the manager of Schiphol estimated this system operate 99.9%of times while being able to minimize loss and damage in that 0.01%. This system is extremely expensive, but if implemented successfully it can save 0.1% of $2.5 billion.

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

From data network, we may contribute on number of baggage, total loss, and defect system on total loss and damage. Also we can include capacity of baggage and automatic data scanner.