It has been an intensive year for Finnair with the continuation of the Carmen Crew Pairing and Rostering projects. The “Crescendo” project approach, where Finnair and Carmen staff jointly performed optimized production planning very early on in the project phase, brought about instant business benefits from the system which financed the remaining project.

According to Ville Iho, AVP Crew Resources at Finnair, the projects have achieved over and above Finnair’s expectations.

“We now have better control over the planning process and planning results. Our biggest bottlenecks in planning have been resolved and we are able to operate much more efficiently,” he said.

“As a result we are now a better partner to our network planning with very short planning process so we can be more flexible and better involved in scenario planning.”

As a result of the projects Finnair have been able to increase the crew cost productivity in various planning areas in the range 2 –7 percent. In addition to this the overall unit costs has been reduced.

“And this has been achieved in spite of increased unit cost pressure generated by changes in the salary structure. The introduction of the new system for Preferential Bidding was important both in order to reduce time to market, and to introduce improvements in the crew agreements on the cabin side.”

Regarding the Crescendo> project, production went “live” according to schedule in all the planning areas in May 2004.

“From a manager’s perspective Crescendo is a brilliant concept. The ability to realise and prove the business results early on takes some of the pressure off the project and gives more space to other issues.”

However, Ville added that from a planner and project manager perspective, Crescendo was a bigger challenge than typical implementations.

“In order to make the hand-over process to the planners as smooth as possible, a lot of focus has to be made on getting the planning team involved as early as possible in the project.”

Ville Iho, is positive regarding Finnair and Carmen’s future partnership.

“We are currently doing our first production plans with the new Carmen Manpower Planning product. At the moment it looks good, Carmen Manpower will be an essential part in integrating crew planning process and making it even more transparent to all involved.”

In addition to Carmen Manpower, Finnair and Carmen continue to work on other projects.

“We are now at the stage where we are aiming to integrate the Carmen products into one single Crew Solution,” concluded Ville Iho.