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Innovation in the Cloud: How Swissport Uses Flight Info Direct to Power Their Global Operations 

Swissport'S Story

Incorporated in 1996, Swissport is the global leader in airport ground services and air cargo handling. Operating in 286 airports in 44 countries, across six continents, they offer a range of ground services, including passenger services, ramp handling, baggage, turnaround coordination, fueling, aircraft cleaning, and more. In 2023, Swissport turned around nearly 2 million aircraft and served more than 230 million passengers. Trusted by some 850 air carriers, Swissport’s global presence is growing, and innovation is a key area of focus.  

We spoke to Swissport’s Global IT Service Owner for Business Operations Applications, Murray Galvin, and Richard Eden, Product Manager, to understand more about how Swissport is using OAG data in the cloud across its key business functions to innovate and scale its operations and commercial strategies. 

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The Challenge

Prior to working with OAG, Swissport sourced schedule data from multiple sources, such as airlines and airports. Updating their database manually was found to be time-consuming and difficult to validate. Any schedule changes that came in, whether via Telex, email, or SSIM file, needed to be updated manually, resulting in processing substantial amounts of data once per week and making changes difficult to track.

As well as an overview of their operational landscape, Swissport were looking to enable and empower their commercial teams with the freshest data, allowing them to make strategic decisions against the current industry landscape and react quickly. Swissport needed a tool that would collate accurate schedules data, could be managed from one place, and exported into various accessible formats for a global multi-disciplinary team.  

Eager to future-proof their operations to ensure scalability and innovation, a solution that didn’t require time-consuming manual downloading and uploading of data was also key. 

Considering Swissport’s global presence in over 280 airports, with plans for expansion, and serving over 230 million passengers per year, they needed to have access to reliable and accurate data with versatile and scalable delivery methods that could grow with them.   

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The Solution

As the leading provider of aviation data and insights, Swissport chose OAG to provide them with a comprehensive view of global airline Schedules and Seats data, refreshed weekly and delivered via Flight Info Direct. Flight Info Direct, powered by Snowflake, is a global aviation data warehouse, containing all of OAG’s data sets, ready to query, integrate and analyze. It allows seamless cross-departmental collaboration and eliminates data silos across organizations, providing instant access to global aviation data.

By accessing Schedules Data in Flight Info Direct, Swissport now has global access to over 70 million forward looking flight schedules and more than 500,000 daily flight schedule changes at the click of a button. They also have access to all other OAG data sets within the same platform, should they need to utilize them in the future. 

By provisioning Snowflake, Swissport were able to easily slot Flight Info Direct into their systems and workflows to ensure reliable and automated updates. 

As their single source of truth for all locations globally, Swissport use Flight Info Direct to understand forward-looking flight schedules, operating in the next 6-7 months to enhance both their short-medium term planning. 

Additionally, Swissport utilizes it during daily operations to comprehend schedules and direct resource management, ensuring smooth execution.

With a multi-disciplinary team located all over the world, Swissport have introduced Flight Info Direct across teams, time zones, and continents. The Swissport team have extract, transform, and load processes in place to integrate the data automatically into their systems, so it's ready-to-query instantly. OAG data has multiple touchpoints throughout Swissport, and is used by every single airport that Swissport operates in.  

 

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‘’When we started the conversation about moving to the cloud from a file, we wanted to be able to quickly react to new customers. The previous manual process made that challenging, but with Flight Info Direct we’re able to very quickly see all scheduled flights at any airport across the world.’’  

Murray Galvin, Global IT Service Owner for Business Operations Applications   

Swissport also stores the data in additional data warehouses, which enables their reporting teams to create detailed reports and dashboards based on historical and forward-looking data, providing insight into what was planned to happen and what actually happened. Seamless integration with a variety of tools has encouraged Swissport to champion data democratization, enabling everyone in the organization to make data-informed decisions and build exceptional customer experiences.  

The results

Since introducing Flight Info Direct to their operations, Swissport have seen a dramatic improvement in their efficiency across teams and data accuracy is at an all-time high. The data is used across multiple Swissport functions, including ground handling applications supporting baggage reconciliation, lost and found, check-in processes, planning and more.  

The reliability and consistency of the data has transformed ways of working and greatly reduced data processing time as the data is already validated by the time it arrives at Swissport.

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Thanks to accurate data, Swissport have been able to remove their data validation and manual upload processes, and OAG integrations are now providing reliable data at the first point-of-call automatically.  

New airport customers are now very easy to onboard, meaning Swissport can grow, develop, and expand easily and efficiently, alongside providing a streamlined and exceptional airport onboarding experience. In addition to this, by enabling more teams within Swissport with OAG data, their focus on sustainable scalability and innovation remains front and center. 

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"Where Flight Info Direct has really benefited us, is that we know that a process is going to run on our side at a certain time, on a certain day, it’s going to get the data, and all that data is going to be available for our users within a few minutes. 

The business know that they are working with high-quality, reliable data, and they see it on a weekly basis appearing - the users know it’s going to be there, and they know it is reliable. We’ve also had very good experiences when we’ve contacted OAG if we have any questions or need help, and the team at OAG, whether Customer Support or Product Management, they’re always happy to jump on a call to help us. We’ve had very good feedback from the team at Swissport. 

Having that relationship, as well as the automation, has given our end users a lot of confidence in the data. There was some nervousness initially about switching to the cloud from manual processes but without exception, the quality of the data, reliability and scalability has been unquestionable.” 

Murray Galvin, Global IT Service Owner for Business Operations Applications   

OAG has the most flexible frequency delivery capability in the market. Its fast and easy to use data solutions and APIs ensure flexible integration and enable technology providers to manage and control their own supply of air travel data – which maximizes efficiency, saves money and creates an unrivalled competitive advantage. OAG’s schedules and flight status data solutions have become the number one choice for technology providers, travel management companies and innovators.