Dynamic Planning & Real-Time Recovery in Ground Handling

The Client

A leading European airport group operating ground handling across multiple airports. The organization had grown to a scale where local planning processes at each site were creating misalignment across the group, and disruption recovery was producing different outcomes depending on who was on shift.

The Challenge

Rosters, charging plans, and equipment allocation were stored in spreadsheets, so every change required slow, manual replanning that consumed planners’ time and introduced inconsistencies. Disruptions were coordinated by phone with no costed trade-offs visible across the teams involved, so outcomes varied wildly, while avoidable delays, overtime, and peak-energy cost accumulated. As local fixes at one airport did not replicate across the group, identical problems resurfaced at each site.

The Solution

Scalefocus delivered one optimization engine that plans ahead and recovers live, reading the group’s existing systems read-only on the sovereign EU cloud. It also provides scheduling and optimization plans under hard capacity, grid, and regulatory limits, as well as soft cost constraints, while resource matching assigns qualified staff in accordance with duty and fatigue rules.

Finally, supply and dependency sync confirms parts, tooling, and bay before scheduling. Having replaced phone coordination with structured options, disruption recovery now produces 3 to 5 costed recovery plans for human approval.

The Results 

• +3-5 percentage-point utilization improvement at the first airport, on a path to +10pp across the group
• 30-40% less recovery effort, costed recovery plans replace phone coordination across teams
• 10-15% reduction in operating cost, overtime and peak-energy spend reduced, with human approval on every change