How airlines can elevate planning velocity and budgeting precision

Learn how transportation leaders can navigate increasing volatility by implementing one central planning platform for greater operational efficiency.

Running an airline is a complex, 24/7/365 operation. Many carriers have multiple brands and alliance partnerships that plan, schedule, and track thousands of flights a day.

In order to spot emerging trends to keep flights and schedules in step with fluctuations, airlines need to conduct detailed planning as operational capacity needs change at hundreds of airports globally—and that typically means redeploying staff, the largest element of controllable cost.

Traditional planning systems designed to support annual budgeting do not provide the speed or flexibility airline carriers need today to predict the unpredictable. Spreadsheets are also incapable of manipulating the billions of transactions across multiple dimensional data combinations encountered in operational planning and budgeting for airlines.

Another complication is that spreadsheets and siloed planning-point solutions preclude the collaboration that is required when planners are distributed around the globe.

These are some of the reasons why an increasing number of airlines are adopting integrated planning solutions across their enterprise. In addition to speed, precision, and collaboration, airlines are gaining numerous other benefits:

• Model builders can quickly amend models to keep them aligned with an ever-changing operations network at their airlines. New model versions that used to take a month or more to produce in spreadsheets can now being produced in a matter of days.
• Flexible, real-time, “what-if” scenarios allow airline managers to rapidly view data by different dimensions and to quickly shift between currencies to see how fluctuations in exchange rates impact corporate results.
• Airline carriers have also seen accuracy improvements in their financial forecasts due to better linkage with operational plans, which allows them to give better earnings guidance to their investors.

In the fast-moving transportation industry, it is imperative finance provides a planning and budgeting platform that facilitates insight at the same speed with which managers need to make decisions—and today, that means real time.

Persisting legacy systems fail to deliver speed, precision, and collaboration and thus, hamper productivity and compromise competitiveness.

To further understand what a Connected Planning platform like Anaplan can do for your airline or transportation organization, watch this video about Brussels Airlines’ experience.