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10 Reasons Why Your Airline Needs An Operations Real-Time Dashboard

It was definitely pretty tough to select only ten reasons why airlines need an operational real-time dashboard. But I accepted the challenge. With this blog post, I’ll give you ten reasons. Ten reasons why you should use an airline operations real-time dashboard. But no worries, this is not a spammy sales-post. But a post that provides ten hard-facts you should be aware of.

A Little Backstory First

Making the best decisions based on holistic and comprehensive insights isn’t always simple. As an airline, you operate complex processes and have to take care of various facetts (weather, crew, passengers, cargo, provider, etc.).

In order not to get lost in operational issues that limit your success, a real-time dashboard reflects a tool that helps you get back on track. A tool that lets you access insights into your operational performance, integrated into one dashboard to give you focus.

Perhaps a real-time dashboard is not the first tool that comes to your mind when thinking about how to structure, organize, and improve your operations. But believe me, having a comprehensive view of all relevant operational information and KPIs will ease your airline’s operations tremendously.

What’s A Real-Time Dashboard?

Before we elaborate on how real-time dashboards help to improve your operations, let’s quickly define what a real-time dashboard is about. Sisense defines real-time dashboards as dashboards that are automatically updated with the latest available data.

These data visualizations offer a combination of historical data and real-time information that is useful for identifying emerging trends and monitoring efficiency.

Airline Real-Time Dashboard at Lufthansa
Airline Real-Time Dashboard at Lufthansa (Source Bild)

Why Your Airline Needs A Real-Time Dashboard — Here Are 10 Reasons

Benefit 1 – At-A-Glance View Of Your Airline’s Performance

An airline operations dashboard gives you access to “the now.” It provides an at-a-glance view of your performance and the most important key performance indicator (KPI) at this very moment.

It is not about showing what happened yesterday, the day before, or last week. It is about your performance at this day, right now.

How’s your on-time performance? How many flights have been operated today? How many misconnex passengers have failed their onward flight this afternoon? And so on.

The core idea of an operations real-time dashboard is in providing the calming feeling of knowing what is going — right now.

Benefit 2 – One-Stop-KPI-Shop

One of the essential benefits of (real-time) dashboards is having all relevant KPIs available and accessible in one tool.

That helps every internal stakeholder and department to keep tracking the KPIs in real-time. And ultimately it ensures that your airline’s objectives are met.

Benefit 3 – Faster Decisions

In operations, every minute counts. Taking a decision too late or making a decision based on wrong/outdated information directly lead to reduced performance and quality.

Aberdeen research shows the use of real-time dashboards facilitates better decision-making. As analyzed over the last two years, real-time dashboard users have improved their time-to-decision at a rate 2.5 times greater than those who don’t use dashboards.

Thus, a key benefit that can be achieved with an airline real-time dashboard is in accelerating decisions.

Benefit 4 – Operational Alignment

Having access to high-quality and accurate data is critical for efficient airline operations.

Knowing the status of your most important KPIs makes it so much easier to discuss and share with relevant departments. Subsequently, this leads to improved decisions based on facts.

Benefit 5 – Accessible Anytime

With real-time dashboards, times are over when you had to wait for the next daily, weekly, or monthly report. Access and monitor your performance at every point in time.

Airline Operations Real-Time Dashboard — Mobile Version
Airline Operations Real-Time Dashboard — Mobile Version

Benefit 6 – Save Money

For this one, we took a look at our clients. One of the most important benefits they mentioned is in improving the most critical operational KPIs.

Although many factors —internal and external— influence OTP, we observed an improvement of this KPI by 1% – 4% over 12 months. Check out the complete article: How small airlines generate savings of €365,000 annually with real-time operations dashboards.

Benefit 7 – Optimize On-the-Fly

As an airline, you operate a very time-critical business.

A real-time dashboard helps you to identify problems when —or even before— they occur and give you the possibility to implement counter-measures.

Benefit 8 – Automated Reporting

Many real-time dashboards offer the functionality of automated reporting. That means you don’t have to wait until someone prepares a report. Just think about all the countless hours of gathering data, calculating KPIs and preparing a Powerpoint, Tableau or whatsoever report.

Moreover, with automated reports, you can be assured to access high-quality and accurate data. The previous risk of human errors simply vanished.

Benefit 9 – Alerts & Notification

Many real-time dashboards provide functionalities to alert you actively whenever relevant KPIs drop below-defined targets.

Accordingly, an airline dashboard provides the benefit that you don’t have to monitor all of your KPIs constantly. It simply alerts you whenever something important happens.

benefits airline real time dashboard
AppleWatch Integration

Benefit 10 – Improved Internal Communication

Dashboards are perfect when it comes to internal communication. Why? Because (if done correctly) they are easy to access and easy to understand for everybody at your airline.

Therefore, operational dashboards let your entire staff monitor your operational performance.

Subsequently, everybody will be motivated to contribute to improved performance.

What Do You Think?

Always happy to get your feedback and opinions. Hit me up on Twitter or get in touch with me on LinkedIn.


Want To Know More About Airline KPIs? Here’s Where To Start!

https://www.id1.de/2020/04/03/70-airline-operations-kpis-to-track-for-improved-operations/

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Benjamin Walther

CEO, Frankfurt

Benjamin is Information Design's CEO and a proven content-maniac. Besides running a successful business and developing pioneering ideas, he's dedicated to writing blog posts and creating content.

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