Summary
Many airline executives believe that their cockpit and cabin crew costs are lowered and managed through the use of a crew scheduling optimizer. While optimizers do increase crew efficiency, they do not correct crew cost overruns, which can often elude airlines that do not realize the root cause of such discrepancies. Crew cost overruns have many causes that optimizing software cannot rectify, including:
- Disruptive management scheduling practices
- Unexpected crew bidding behavior
- Post processing system limitations
- Compensation design vs. reality
L.E.K. believes that applying specialized analytical tools to address the crew cost issue allows airlines to prevent creating expensive pairings, identify and prevent abuses of the system, and determine and avoid the costs of various management actions.
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