CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Lufthansa
Airline soars with new crew scheduler
Then: 14,500 crewmembers matched to more than 3,500 flights – by hand. Now: Lufthansa automates the process with a new crew scheduling system based on ILOG CPLEX.

Lufthansa (www.lufthansa.com) is one of the biggest, well-managed airlines in the world. Its worldwide fleet of over 300 planes carried more than 51 million passengers in 2005 alone.

To sustain its growth and further improve customer service and employee satisfaction, the airline implemented an automatic crew assignment system using ILOG optimization software. Lufthansa now creates duty rosters in a more effective, responsive and cost-effective way, while significantly reducing the time it takes to do so.

By using ILOG CPLEX, Lufthansa has streamlined and automated its crew rostering. The new system takes into account costs, individual crew preferences, industry and government regulatory requirements, and internal corporate policies. Once locked into manually assigning crews, Lufthansa planners now have one tool that automates the manual process as well as frees them to run simulations to further improve operations.

“Creating a higher amount of duty rosters of better quality and in a shorter amount of time is a big step forward and would not have been possible without ILOG CPLEX,” says Dr. Wilhelm Westerburg, IT project manager for Crew Management Systems at Lufthansa. “The automatic rostering system using ILOG optimization can solve complex problems very rapidly, allowing the schedule of a group comprised of 200 to 500 cockpit personnel, and 500 to 2,000 cabin staff to be established in a matter of hours instead of days.”

This is roughly what SNCF Fret (http://fret.sncf.com) was looking at. France’s national freight railway has thousands of employees throughout France and much of the rest of Europe, all working directly with customers to arrange shipments. Until recently, they had no central system that applied the most recent pricing policies and regulations in real time. This placed them at a disadvantage in negotiating contracts.

Now, that’s all been changed. As part of a modernization effort, SNCF Fret has adopted a new pricing system based on ILOG JRules, the leading business rule management system. It automates the pricing policies for the railway’s domestic and international traffic management business, which represents €1.82 billion ($2.2 billion) of SNCF’s annual revenue, reducing processing costs by 20 percent. The new system centralizes thousands of pricing rules, enabling SNCF Fret’s sales people to quickly make detailed sales proposals that exactly match their customers’ specific requirements. Moreover, the new system can easily be updated as soon as a new policy or regulation is introduced. The system automates the pricing process, gives sales a tool to directly control and modify pricing, and assures consistent and transparent billing.

“This strategic project was characterized by a swift return on investment and provides us with the means to adapt to our environment and to our market, and to remain competitive by creating a climate of trust with our clients,” says Idriss Elasri, client back-office program manager for SNCF Fret. “The business rules technology, deployed in just six months, enabled us to deploy an application that provides us with better agility and transparency. In IT terms, we now have a high-performance, scalable and easy-to-maintain system, which simultaneously meets the needs of internal and external clients.”

BlueCube Software (www.bluecube.com) is a top integrator of operations management solutions for the retail industry. It specializes in intuitive Web-based systems that centralize control of store operations, including forecasting, scheduling and tracking employees. The independent software vendor’s solution greatly simplifies retail employee scheduling and payroll monitoring. Store managers enter employee availability and time-off information into the Web-based scheduler, and literally overnight, the system generates a new, complete schedule of employee assignments that tracks perfectly to the store’s business requirements.

ILOG CPLEX is at the core of BlueCube Enterprise’s extensive problem-solving capability. The leading mathematical programming component applies store-specific constraints to fully optimize schedules. ILOG CPLEX’s flexibility and speed also help stores quickly change schedules to address unforeseen events such as employee illness and fluctuations in business resulting from bad weather.

“Retailers need solutions that can flexibly and accurately respond to an increasingly complex operational environment at the store,” says Pete Reilly, vice president and general manager of retail at BlueCube Software. “ILOG CPLEX powers our solution, and, in turn, this helps us deliver solutions that can easily scale to our larger clients. The result is that our customers achieve better implementation of their labor deployment models, and the ideal alignment of staff to the workload. ILOG CPLEX plays a major role in realizing these benefits for our customers.”

This is where ILOG CPLEX and ILOG OPL Development Studio step in. Powering an application called the Seed Batch Distribution System (SBDS), these ILOG products minimize batch splitting to maximize seed tracking. SBDS takes the constraints for the problem – more than 10 warehouses, 100 seed types and hundreds of batches – and fills the trucks that deliver the seeds in a way that ensures seeds from the fewest number of batches possible are used with each truckload. This enables the company to easily comply with regulations governing seed distribution and tracking. ILOG OPL Development Studio lets Südzucker’s experienced OR team easily enter constraints to generate the distribution models used by ILOG CPLEX to allocate seeds to deliveries.

“We’ve had nothing but success with ILOG OPL Development Studio and ILOG CPLEX,” says Steffen Lukesch, organization programmer at Südzucker. “It lets us develop fast and deliver excellent customer support. No doubt we made the right decision in going with ILOG.”

Baosteel found the answer with the Enterprise Master Planning (EMP) solution, based on ILOG CPLEX, the world-leading mathematical programming software, and built by Shanghai FirstTech Co. Ltd. (www.firsttech-soft.com), a key ILOG partner in China for more than two years. The new planning solution shortens Baosteel’s order-to-delivery cycle time significantly and decreases the company’s order confirmation time from days to mere seconds. Additionally, the planning cycle time has been reduced from three weeks to just one.

Baosteel’s old supply chain planning system was a spreadsheet-driven process that quickly proved incapable of keeping pace with the company’s rapid growth. EMP handles over 10,000 products for more than 1,000 customers in a 90-day planning horizon. It also lets Baosteel perform demand planning, enterprise master planning, order promising and capacity allocation while considering multiple parameters such as profit goals, customer tiers, product lines and different factory capacities. FirstTech provided development and consulting services for the project, applying ILOG’s well-known expertise in supply chain management. Baosteel plans to use the new system to further expand its operations to reach new customers and create new production facilities in China and elsewhere in the world.