Questions/Answers

Ensuring everyone knows what is happening and what to expect at any given time is a huge task for the largest international airport in the world, hosting a multi-stakeholder environment and serving more than 90 million passengers a year. Like many others, Dubai Airports was communicating manually with the entire airport community comprising thousands of workers at any one time, either through a phone call, email or SMS. During busy operational periods, this was a challenging task as the recipients addresses had to be inserted manually for every message based on the nature of information or different contacts for the same information in case of phone calls. The lack of up-to-date information where it was needed has led to sub-optimal decisions, which quickly impacts on airport operations and passenger service by missing some important communication or delay in receiving/reading key messages. The objective of this initiative is to empower our stakeholders by bringing the information into palm of their hands, created a community in the airport, breaking silos and bringing together the different elements of the ecosystem which has led to drastic improvements of services and awareness among the stakeholders during normal as well as disruption times.

The “Airport Community” App, deployed in Dubai as the first airport in the region, is a collaborative information sharing platform for all stakeholders (both for Dubai Airport employees and all its stakeholders). This app improves airport operations situational awareness by increasing the timeliness and accuracy of information availability at all passenger touch points, covering essential operational details such as aircraft gates, flight departure times, passenger processing and queuing times and predictions of passenger throughput volumes. This information allows better planning decisions which improves the predictability of resources, optimizes the utilization of resources and delivers an improved passenger experience through reduced queuing times and more efficient processing. Thus, all stakeholders become a better passenger host regardless of who they work for.

The initiative has tremendous added value and has indirect benefit to the community: - It cuts down cost of communicating and man hour planning significantly. - It helps our customers complete their throughput through the airport much faster as a result of proper operational planning. - It streamlines the whole customer journey by aligning all stakeholders and their view of operations. - Information has empowered our stakeholders, even the less senior of the employees have gained a strategic understanding of the priorities. - The app has created a community in the airports, breaking silos and bringing together the different elements of the ecosystem that constitutes the industry

Due to the collaboration efforts and the gathering of different stakeholder needs, the community app evolved to be a holistic solution covering all airport operations, catering for the needs of a significant number of stakeholders that work together harmoniously to provide the best passenger experience. As a result, Dubai Airport continues to climb the ranks of global airport competitiveness. The most important impact of this initiative is that “Communication can Save Lives”. As witnessed in the incident of EK521, the speed of emergency response and the collaborative decision making and of deployment of teams on ground, among the different stakeholders, from the firefighters down to the minute customer service details wouldn’t have been possible without a platform like the community app. The unprecedented success of overcoming the plane crash incident that took place on the 3rd of August 2016, with zero passenger causalities & resuming operations within 24 hours, can be attributed to ability to provide continuous updates of key flight information and status updates to all operational employees during the time of the crisis.

First of its kind in the region, Airport Community App acts as an information hub to inform staff at the airport about environment status that may impact their business processes. Access to the app is not only for Dubai Airports employees but also for all people working on the airport campus, employed by airlines, ground handlers, other government agencies, retailers, etc. Currently, it is used by over 15,000 users from 100+ different organizations and usage numbers continues to increase. Since its inception, Airport Community App has significantly improved the passenger experience and service quality by making best use of available information to dynamically respond to Dubai Airports constantly changing environment.

Dubai Airports has a vision to have a collaborative information sharing platform to distribute the timely and accurate information to all the stakeholders at palm of their hands to support planned and predicted ways of working together to improve the passenger journey at all touch points. We found right partner who could take us through this journey. This platform was initially deployed at one of UK airports and was at its initial stage when Dubai Airports embarked on this journey. Within 2 years we have added lot of new features into the app including dedicated sections for our service partners, flydubai and EXPO2020. The app is evolving as fast as our business and does not stop. Today we have more users and features and it is growing fast.

The initiative is evolving as fast as our business and does not stop. Dubai Airports is now considered as the benchmark for this initiative and number of delegations from other airports are visiting us to have an overview of the app and how we are using it. It is supporting to build an airport community where one airport can get benefit from the features implemented at other airport. Not only this, it also allows the airline crew to switch between the airports to know about what is happening at the airport where they are travelling to within the app. App has also won Aeronnovation awards organized by General civil aviation authority in improve passenger experience category for year 2017.

The Airport Community App has been designed as a collaborative effort. Dubai Airports departments, customers and stakeholders have been consistently involved during the design phase of the app. A working group comprises of all stakeholders across the aviation sector meet on monthly basis where they pitch for and agree new features that will be implemented. An agile project management approach is adopted that focuses on continuous releases and incorporating customer feedback with every iteration, allowing rapid response to changing business needs and incorporation of new ideas. Various training workshops have been conducted on the application functionality to ensure transfer of knowledge and increase adoption. This approach has produced great results due to the various inputs from the working group and the studied utilization of systems available, integrating all existing solutions into one platform and minimizing un-required investment.

This initiative is considered a global benchmark on how to build an integrated platform for a large organization. It is a scalable platform that drives decision making across the airport. The platform has integrated with over 27 government and private sector partners, all of whom are critical to the daily operations within the airport. The app is becoming the de-facto standard for information sharing not only in Dubai Airport but at other airports to address the potential disruptions before they become problems. The staff and partners are now equipped with the tools to be able to proactively manage their resources and react effectively to unexpected events. The community app constitutes a single, thoughtful, elegant, and cost effective solution to a data integration and business decision‐making problem. These problems could have been solved at much higher cost, and much less effective building a whole new big system. The Dubai Airport demonstrates global best practice, beyond their sector in how they tackled the issues.

Yes

The criteria used to evaluate are the efficiency and effectiveness of the initiative, sustainability of the initiative and how it is contributing the continuous endeavor of government of Dubai to enhance its services to reflect the government’s commitment to providing a better life to its customers from all segments and in all areas.

The indicators used to evaluate the service are: • Customer insights - It illustrates the importance of understanding the various needs and expectations of customers, and places them at the core of the government services delivery process. • Customer experience - It illustrates the most important areas that lead to providing customers with a positive experience throughout all touch points with a government entity. • Service efficiency - to assess the relationship between the service inputs and outputs, and to demonstrate the improvement in the service efficiency • Service realization - It relates to the criteria of service definition, design, development, testing, and verification. • Service sustainability – to emphasizes the importance of the leadership role in building and reinforcing a service improvement culture and ensure continuity of improvement

Area of Strength: The initiative is considered a global benchmark on how to build an integrated platform for a large organization. This is a scalable platform that drives decision making across the airport. The platform constitutes a single, thoughtful, elegant, and cost-effective solution to a data integration and business decision‐making problem. These problems could have been solved at much higher cost, and much less effective building a whole new big system. Dubai Airport demonstrates global best practice, beyond their sector in how they tackled the issues. Area of improvements: The challenge could be to scale up the platform to add additional services and users while at the same time maintaining usability, security and reliability. As more users are on‐boarded onto the platform, there could be emphasis on ensuring that the data being shared is secured, especially that the app is being installed on private user devices. Consider looking into consolidating any remaining services and/or other communication channels to the platform to reduce the need of having to track several applications, services and devices by the staff.

The Community App has been designed as collaborative effort. Dubai Airports customers, partners and stakeholders have been consistently involved during the design stage. The total operations were identified, and multiple meetings and discussions were held with airlines, authorities as well as handling agents during which we identified customer pain points and corrective actions that would be facilitated through the timely and transparent dissemination of information and triggers to enhance the overall planning and results of the key operations. Successful examples of the identified needs and its solutions through these sessions are listed below: • Establishment of monthly working group comprises of all stakeholders across the aviation sector where they pitch for and agree new features that will be implemented • Close coordination and workshops with flydubai on smart ways of sharing information and design a section exclusively for fly Dubai in community app to be used by flydubai airport supervisors, command center, operations and pilot’s community • Engagement with the customer service delivery and corporate resilience teams as an internal stakeholder at the design resulting in application functionality improvement e.g. introducing airport performance feature to show airline daily performance and minim requirements to reach the monthly target • Introduction of baggage tracking system by integrating with Dubai Airports, EK and DNATA baggage handling system to enable the tracking of passenger bags • Introduction of FACT section to be used for references of local or international standards, best practices and regulation by HSSE as single source of information in community app • Workshop with immigration for specific requirement gathering on passengers’ load vs. resources deployment information and to enable/integrate community app with immigration operations center (IOC).

Massive Success of Community App has led to various joint collaborative initiatives and major projects kicking off at the airport to further improve and resolve key operational challenges at various touch points at the airport. Queue busting initiatives at immigration and emigration halls, Passenger queue and throughput monitoring at various key locations at the airport and state-of-the-art self-service FIDS solutions are some of the examples of the continuous improvement initiatives running at the airport. Community App functionalities and features keep improving, recent implementation of track bags, track flights, track staff buses, information on passenger service requests, information on queues and introduction of new useful channels and topics for flydubai, EXPO2020 and hospitality teams are further strengthening the capabilities and use of community app to drive performance