London Heathrow Airport selects Better Airport® to improve airport operations

26th November 2018

HEATHROW SELECTS BETTER AIRPORT® TO IMPROVE AIRPORT OPERATIONS AND ACCOMMODATE FUTURE GROWTH

Europe’s busiest airport now has access to an entire platform of insight and analytics to improve planning, postpone investments, and improve passenger experience

COPENHAGEN – November 26, 2018 – Copenhagen Optimization, the makers of the Better Airport® software solution, today announced a major partnership with Heathrow Airport. The alliance puts Better Airport®, the airport solution designed to optimize the planning, execution, and evaluation of airport operations, into the hands of hundreds of users throughout the airport and their airline partners.
Heathrow has selected Better Airport® after an extensive software solution search and a one-month trial period with Better Airport®’s security, check-in, and baggage modules implemented across the airport.
Better Airport®’s plug-and-play solution design meant Heathrow was up and running with almost the full power of Better Airport® swiftly. After the airport’s one-month trial period, Copenhagen Optimization and the Heathrow team identified a list of possible enhancements to the software to match the complex operation at Heathrow. The enhancements were minor and are delivered free of charge as part of the SaaS subscription, thereby avoiding the hassle of going through lengthy change request cycles. Also, the enhancements are not tailored to Heathrow but are applicable to most airport operations across the world.
“The really exciting part of this solution roll-out is that Heathrow is future proofing and professionalizing their entire planning process across all of security, baggage, and check-in,” says Kasper Hounsgaard, Managing Partner at Copenhagen Optimization. “Better Airport® passed the test in one of the most complex airport operations in the world. We already have a solid base to build on and are looking forward to the partnership with Heathrow. With Better Airport®, the skilled planning team at Heathrow can optimize and automate their current planning processes, including the ability to quantify any what-if scenarios with hard numbers, which will lead to better resource allocation and higher cost savings. Heathrow is ready for significant future growth.”
Airport expansion is well underway at Heathrow. With the expansion, Britain’s exporters will have up to 40 new long-haul trading links, billions of pounds in growth will flow from boosted inbound tourism and investment and the project will drive the creation of thousands of new skilled jobs across the UK. The airport expects to see 78 million passengers in 2018 and to expand capacity to 130 million passengers per year in the coming years. Better Airport® ensures the planning and decision process is fully professionalized across departments as Heathrow nearly doubles their passenger capacity to become the world’s largest international airport.
“Our team have an overall strategy called Operate to Plan, in which we create a tactical plan about 9 months out and continuously update it as we get new information,” says Mark Burgess, Head of Operational Planning, Performance, & Transformation at Heathrow. “Better Airport® allows us to make those updates automatically and in real-time based on continuously updated information. We are now able to make better informed operational decisions based on shared, common data. We are improving the check-in, security, and baggage processes and aligning the entire planning process across operations. This will allow us to decrease wait times and continue to improve operations and passenger experience, as we prepare for the future of airport experience.”