Waiting in long queues at airports is non-productive and boring. One of the busiest airports in India was seeing longer and longer queues at their security check step, resulting in longer waiting times for the passengers, whose number is increasing with every passing day in India.
Every airport has this step to check and remove/dispose of any restricted items which the passengers might be carrying. Finding such items with any passenger is called an “incident” and airports are mandated to keep a detailed record of all such incidents. This process was paper-based and therefore the “incident capture time” was quite high. That was one of the root causes of the longer queues and waiting times for passengers. Our job was to reduce the incident capture time using digital technologies.
We analyzed their current process: how they were capturing incidents, what information they were writing down in their registers, and how they were maintaining the records. Most of the steps were quite straightforward and hence finding ways to optimize it was really challenging.
However, we managed to come up with two solutions. The first was obvious – to convert their offline register entries into digital format. The second one was not that obvious – to eliminate writing/typing of the data that was supposed to be captured. Major part of this data is about journey, which is encoded on the boarding passes of passengers. Our first option was to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the boarding pass image, but the challenge is that the boarding passes of all the airlines have different formats, which theoretically can also change over time (although not very frequently).
So we came up with another solution and used “certain aspects” of the boarding-pass itself to capture all the required passenger and journey data. To know more about this, please do contact us.
After completing our analysis, we came up with a Mobile Application which made the job of the security staff smooth. We made the application in such a way that we were able to capture all the required data for incident reports. The overall app flow required the security staff to simply tap on certain options, which is what made their job quite easy. In straight forward cases, the operator has to just do THREE CLICKs and done!
So, we successfully enabled the capture of all the required information in a digital format, without the need to type anything manually. That has reduced the incident capture time significantly! Also, as the data is captured digitally, reporting is straightforward & easy, and gives deep insights into what is happening at each counter as well as at the entire Security Check step. This was virtually impossible to do the way they were doing things manually before we implemented the solution.
Generating various reports is greatly helping them while going through audits on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Also, real-time analytics dashboards are available for supervisors and higher authorities. More importantly, the counts on the dashboard help them to keep an eye on the busiest machines and take timely action to distribute the load across all the machines and keep the waiting times for passengers to a minimum.
Our application has resulted in reducing the incident capture time from 60 seconds to 20 seconds per PAX and improved the overall performance of the function by 26%! So, this solution saved about 40 seconds of time for thousands of passengers traveling from the airport.
We at CoReCo Technologies focus on applying technology to solve real word problems and do value addition to the end users. During the solutioning phase, our focus is on solving the problem, not on technology; in other words, for us, technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. Also, we go the extra mile to find the best solution given the constraints (like cost and time). That is what helped us find the non-obvious solution in this case.
As of January 2024, we have served 60+ global customers with 100+ digital transformation projects successfully executed. For more details, please do visit us at www.corecotechnologies.com or write to [email protected].
Nikunj Buddhbhatti
Senior Software Engineer
CoReCo Technologies Private Limited
