Statistics Again
Well I guess it had to happen.
In order to optimize the roster to avoid any overtime the CRS has to be restricted further. This to make sure that the current human intervention can be avoided by allowing the bid system to input those nasty flights most were trying to avoid.
What other programming will be put in “under the hood” will also be a grey area I’m sure.
Clearly roster satisfaction will get worse “to meet the business demand”. On the bright side it will probably distribute the unpleasant elements in a more balanced way than simply taking someone off their requested trip because they might go into productivity.
It does make me laugh though. The management is obsessed with cutting employee costs further and increasing productivity at all costs. Crew lifestyle is the very last consideration again. However the employee costs have decreased slowly to 12.8 % of expenses. Fuel has climbed to 40%.
12.8% is impressive by any airline standard and this has decreased from 13.2% the previous year and from 15.9% in 2010.
But it is a law of diminishing return. This graph can only flatten out. There are much bigger fish to fry in the fuel area but as we all know, they don’t have the skill to do this apart from attack it with a hammer and the usual techniques of threaten and punish or fiddle around the edges with delayed APU start, idle reverse etc.
To me it seems all this energy is expended in the wrong areas. This is probably because they need to justify those bonuses with unscientific statistics and the appearance of doing something meaningful. Pressure from above must translate into a flogging below. A very third world mentality embraced by many of the ostensibly first world management.
So they continue to disenfranchise the very people that have some control over the single major cost item and who understand the many areas in which this cost is accumulated and could be meaningfully reduced with some innovative thinking.
Why would you only punish but not reward with the figures showing what they do? Surely an equally and always applicable profit share scheme and an abolition of the dangerously motivating bonus scheme would be the way to address both issues?
Where we are right now, a 1% increase in employee costs is less than 33% of a 1% rise in fuel costs.
Now there is a statistic.