By securing a long-term contract to provide terminal wheelchair service to London’s Heathrow Airport, Air Serv Corporation has enhanced its already solid position as a global leader. Keith Regan learns how the company plans to leverage its experience and turn Heathrow into a model for using technology and operational excellence to further enhance service while driving down costs.
For at least the next five years, Air Serv Corporation will be the exclusive provider of wheelchair services to every commercial airline flight in and out of London’s Heathrow Airport. The contract—the largest of its type ever awarded—represents a major win for the eight-year-old Atlanta company, which is vowing to use it as a platform to create a new model for efficiently and cost-effectively providing such services, a model that could over time be duplicated in airports around the world.
Air Serv is already the leader in the category, which it helped create when it was founded in 2002, operating wheelchair services in 12 of the 30 busiest airport markets worldwide, including five of the top eight and—with Heathrow, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson and Chicago’s O’Hare—all of the top three.
“What we leveraged to win that contract is a proven system that relies on technology and that greatly enhances productivity,” says Air Serv’s chief executive officer, Thomas Marano.
Air Serv was founded shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ravaged the commercial airlines, which actively sought an outsourcing partner with the expertise to handle support services, providing handling and cleaning services as well as delivery of passengers who need assistance to and from terminal gates.
The Heathrow contract represents an emerging opportunity because the airport provides all ground-based wheelchair services to all airlines—a model that is now required by law in Europe and has the support of airlines in the United States as well. The contract runs for five years with options that could extend it to seven and from the outset could mean as much as $15 million to $20 million in new revenue for Air Serv, which did about $200 million in business in 2009, when the company grew at a 35 percent clip despite the economic recession.
Air Serv’s approach uses a centralized dispatch center, a workforce that is equipped with handheld devices, and a work order management system that directs employees between assignments in the most efficient way possible. Just as a shipping firm can cut costs by better orchestrating the logistics of its fleet, Air Serv can cut costs by providing equal or better service with fewer workers, and therefore at a lower cost. “Our system allows us to create significant productivity enhancements while meeting the quality standards of our clients,” Marano says.
The same model is used when Air Serv handles cargo or performs plane-cleaning services, with data gathered from the field in real time able to be analyzed and tracked to assess efficiency and productivity and to enable a higher level of service quality to be achieved. “We believe we have innovated a better model,” Marano says, adding that worker productivity has been shown to improve by as much as 15 percent using its approach. “We undergo quarterly business reviews with senior operators at all the global airlines, and we strongly believe that our disciplined, data-driven approach gives us the ability to increase our business with all of them if we perform well.”
Long-term demographic trends suggest growth in the number of passengers who will require wheelchair assistance while traveling. “There’s definitely a higher penetration rate in terms of the percentage of mobility-impaired passengers per plane,” says Marano.
At the same time, airlines and airports are favoring consolidation, recognizing the waste associated with each airline using its own employees or with employees provided by security contractors waiting until a wheelchair call is made.
“We really have a very exceptional demand forecasting system that enables us to directly connect with airlines and look at both flight schedules and passenger load factors to better plan the labor force,” Marano says. “That better first step means better operations.”
Because every worker’s actions are captured electronically, Air Serv is able to re-plan constantly, updating forecasts in real time. “This solution didn't exist prior to us. We developed and commercialized it. The reason it works so well is that the actual operators of the service used technology to create it, versus a software developer who has no operational experience designing an app.”
Looking ahead, Air Serv is at work with a client on a plan to create a single call center that covers all of its airport hub locations, rather than a center at each site. “That is something we are looking at carefully and are optimistic that it could become an even bigger competitive advantage.”
As it focuses on continuing to grow its core business, Air Serv relies on strategic partners and suppliers to handle key administrative functions. For instance, to handle payments and benefits for its fast-growing workforce—the company grew from 35 employees to more than 9,000 in the span of about seven years—Air Serv works with Valiant Workforce Management Solutions.
Growth continues, with as many as 500 new workers to be brought on board for the Heathrow account and overall as many as 2,000 more people being hired in the next two years. All those workers will be trained extensively in safety and customer satisfaction, with the company regularly awarding employees who perform exceptionally, and its Web site features stories of wheelchair service professionals who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in their workdays.
That service excellence, when combined with productivity gains that help keep costs down, is the key ingredient in the company’s recent success. “The bottom line is that in the world’s toughest industry, in its toughest period of time, and in the global economy’s toughest period, we’ve been a growth business,” Marano says. www.airservcorp.com
