www.talend.com ©Talend 2019 · EN

Improving quality of services for passengers and operational efficiency Aeroporti di Roma (ADR) manages and develops Roma Fiumicino (Leonardo da Vinci) and Ciampino airports, carrying out activities connected and complementary to airport management. In 2018, nearly 100 airlines operated out of the two airports, carrying 48.8 million passengers to more than 230 destinations worldwide.

Against the backdrop of the competitive airport industry, ADR’s goal is to make its Rome airports the gateway to Italy. To do this, the company must attract new airlines and provide customers with the best experience possible. But airport operations are complex and unpredictable, and if not managed properly, can result in an unsatisfactory experience for customers.

Fabrizio Magliocca is Head of Operational Planning and Deputy Chief of Terminal Operations at Rome Fiumicino. “Imagine the airport as a highly complex system with many variables—late flights, bad weather, employee strikes, and other unexpected events. Things can change very quickly,” he says. “To accomplish our goal, we must prevent airport congestion, make the best use of our infrastructure, and offer the right level of service to airport customers. Having access to reliable data is crucial to predicting what might happen and how to respond.”

Increased demand for data integration and self-service visualizationTo optimize airport processes, ADR knew that the first step was to identify, analyze, and understand its customers. The company operates 21 automated boarding pass control stations, 51 eGates for automated ePassport control, 2,000 Wi-Fi access points, and 3,000 Bluetooth beacons. Through these and other technologies, ADR generates around 25 million data records (nearly 2 GB) per day.

ADR wanted to utilize this data to better understand passenger behavior and predict

what will happen when the unpredictable happens. By understanding when customers arrive for flights and how they move through the airport, the company can utilize passenger flow simulation to properly scale security and passport control personnel; identify key areas of infrastructure; and offer the right level of service for customers.

“In every business sector, identification, analysis, and understanding of the customer are crucial factors in ensuring successful commercial performance,” says Raffaele Pasquini, Head of Marketing and Business Development. “Airports are no exception.”

ADR was using Excel spreadsheets and a lot of manpower to analyze its data. The process was time-consuming and required the commitment of different data owners, and the predictions were not always accurate. At the same time, the company’s IT department was receiving increased demand for data integration and self-service visualization. This demand, along with the growth in data sources and volumes, compelled ADR to investigate a new way to collect and present data.

“To ensure a quality customer experience, improve operational excellence and optimize cost, we knew that we had to deliver innovative, efficient, high-quality self-service data services to the entire company,” says Pietro Caminiti, Head of IT Solutions.

Why Talend?ADR searched for a solution which enabled it to collect, manage, and create value from its data. With the help of its partners, the company built a Big Data Analytics platform using Cloudera for the data lake, Talend Big Data for the ingestion engine, and Qlik Sense and Qlik GeoAnalytics to analyze the data and visualize the geolocalization points on the airport maps.

ADR chose Talend for its ability to integrate

“With Talend, we can predict when passengers will engage core airport processes, enabling us to right-size manpower, prevent congestion, and offer the right level of service. All of these decisions are now data driven.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Logistics/Transportation

INFORMATION• HQ: Italy • 1,001-5,000 employees

USE CASES• Customer experience • Operational efficiency

CHALLENGE• Improve airport operations

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Big Data

RESULTS• 48.8 million passengers (150,000 passengers daily during the summer)

• 25 million data records (nearly 2 GB) per day

• Recognized as Europe’s number one airport (ACI - Airport Service Quality programme)

”Pietro Caminiti, Head of IT Solutions

with Oracle and Hadoop, as well as its graphic features in order to create a native code wizard. Other important features include data elaboration in memory and the Talend Administration Center, which enables ADR to manage and maintain Talend from both an application and infrastructure level.

“With Talend, we can analyze large data volumes in order to extract strategic information through advanced statistical algorithms while also complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards,” says Caminiti.

Emanuele Calà is Head of Service Quality and Improvement Projects for ADR. He explains the importance of quality data to achieving the company’s goals: “Data is the foundation on which we make decisions, so data quality is critical for our success. To us, data quality means not only the exactness of the data itself, but also of updating, sampling, adequate representation, and attention to potential synergies between different databases. We want our data to represent the reality of every business process. Talend enabled us to understand processes and customer behaviors, define improvement actions in the shortest possible time, and monitor the consequent effects.”

Implementing self-service has enabled ADR to understand what has happened in the past when unexpected events occurred without having to wait for external contributors. “Self-service is a life saver,” says Magliocca. “We can run different analyses, make comparisons between several scenarios, discuss them, and start over until we find what we think is the right answer. And we can do it accordingly to our deadlines because we are not dependent on the availability of others.”

ADR’s partners have been instrumental in the project’s success. “Our partners have been with us on our data journey from the beginning and our partnership continues to grow with new opportunities and challenges. We appreciate their deep knowledge about big data and our data management platform, and their ability to propose advanced services and use cases to solve business problems,” says Caminiti.

Enhancing the passenger experience and airport operationsWith Talend, ADR has been able to improve airport operations, enhancing the customer experience and making the airport more attractive to new airlines.

Due to the everyday unpredictability and limitations of the existing airport

infrastructure, ADR wanted to maximize the utilization of its existing infrastructure. To do this, the company needed to predict problems before they happened and then plan staffing throughout the airport.

“A typical passenger journey is made of several steps, and each of these steps represents an operational process that we try to manage in the best possible way,” explains Magliocca. “With Talend, we know with a high level of confidence when each passenger on each flight is expected to engage our core processes, such as check-in, security control, and passport controls. Knowing this information in advance gives us room to right-size manpower, prevent congestion, and offer the right level of service.”

Talend also enables ADR to create more sophisticated segmentation of passengers than its previous designations of ‘Leisure’ and ‘Business.’ The company can utilize clustering and profiling (anonymously) to develop a range of key passenger profiles and give a much more detailed portrait of each passenger in order to target marketing actions.

“These segmentations provide us not only with a more detailed understanding of passenger needs, preferences, and behaviors, but also give guidance on how those parameters are evolving—creating a series of passenger portraits that are unique to that airport,” explains Pasquini.

“Better understanding customer behavior enables us to determine, always anonymously, which shops and restaurants are visited most and to identify the most effective points of communication and advertising,” adds Pasquini.

“We are also currently conducting up to 24 to 25,000 interviews per year,” explains Roberto Formica, Projet Manager on Service Quality and Improvement. “We look at two issues to facilitate improvement overall: perceived quality and delivered quality. Perceived quality is about the services we offer to passengers. Delivered quality is a measurement of each process. Let’s say there are long lines at check-in. We work with other departments, such as Operations and together find ways to improve performance for passengers.”

With Talend, we have improved our 48.8 million passenger’s experience and operation’s efficiency,” says Caminiti. “And we have been recognized as Europe’s number one airport with over 40 million passengers according to ACI World’s globally-established Airport Service Quality programme.”

“We are using Talend and Cloudera to collect, cleanse, and govern over 25 million pieces of raw data daily from a wide range of sources to improve operational efficiency and provide an enjoyable airport experience for our travelers.”

www.talend.com/contact | info@talend.com | partners@talend.com | sales@talend.com