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Meet the expectations of running an airport with a resilient service management platform

Reorganize your service management efforts to reduce downtime caused by issues and improve the traveler experience with excellent airport maintenance.

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Service management platform for airport

Airports have thousands of workstations, machines, software, and safety measures that need to be maintained for smooth operations. Failing to quickly address and rectify issues, such as malfunctioning boarding pass scanners, check-in workstations, luggage belts, or scanners for critical assets like safety hatches, can lead to disruptions. These disruptions in turn lead to thousands of people being affected or worse—the loss of human life. So, it is vital that IT and non-IT maintenance teams in airports are equipped with the right tools to keep all these components in check.

Just like any service delivery team, airport maintenance teams can greatly benefit from a unified service desk for airport management with a federated approach to managing incidents, monitoring components, and tracking their health.

Common challenges that airport maintenance teams face

Fast incident resolution during peak travel seasons

With so many mission-critical services that need to be maintained, airport maintenance teams cannot afford to be slow to respond to issues. Slow maintenance efforts or maintenance delays can lead to major disruptions in critical services across the airport, the stranding of thousands of travelers, or, in worst case scenarios, the loss of human life.

Un-fun fact:

Boston's Logan International Airport and New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport suffered long delays in May 2021 due to a hardware issue that affected check-ins.

Incident resolution
Asset failure management

Undetected asset failures leading to boarding bottlenecks

The vast IT and non-IT infrastructures of an airport include a lot of workstations, sensors, scanning machines, luggage belts, display monitors, software, and HVAC systems. Siloed management of these assets offers a skewed, incomplete view of the airport's infrastructures.

It is important to integrate asset management with incident management to keep track of problematic assets, identify assets that are down or affected by issues, and manage the maintenance activities of these assets. A fragmented view of the infrastructures prevents maintenance teams from identifying how incidents affect the rest of the airport's services and operations.

Un-fun fact:

George Bush Intercontinental Airport faced HVAC issues in June 2023 that affected thousands of travelers, with temperatures rising up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Establishing comprehensive, centralized observability for the extensive technology used in aviation

Thousands of mission-critical endpoints need to work together for the successful operation of an airport. Each of these endpoints is at risk of failing and causing disruptions at any time, like a malfunctioning boarding pass scanner that slows down boarding or a compromised security scanner that brings operations to a halt.

Un-fun fact:

Lexington's Blue Grass Airport suffered delays in July 2022 due to TSA screening machines going down.

Airport endpoint management
Airport infrastructure maintenance planning

Maintaining high visibility during airport infrastructure maintenance

Just like any organization, an airport makes a variety of changes to its infrastructures, from upgrading patches across workstations to installing new luggage belts, display monitors, and security scanners. Poorly planned changes result in unplanned downtime and unintentional disruptions to other operations or services. Changes require careful planning and proper approval before implementation.

Un-fun fact:

The TSA decided to upgrade scanning machines across several airports in April 2022. Unfortunately, the scanning machines were slow, and the personnel were not sufficiently trained to handle them. This resulted in delays across airports, showing how important it is for airports to plan out changes carefully and do proper testing before implementation to eliminate unplanned downtime.

Developing strategies to enhance resilience in the face of persistent issues that delay travelers

When a major disruption strikes an airport, the main objective is to restore services as soon as possible, and more often than not, the root cause of the issue is ignored. This leaves the door open for similar issues to strike again in the future. Airports constantly face issues across both IT and non-IT infrastructures, including scanner crashes, workstation malfunctions, HVAC failures, and luggage belt breakdowns.

It is vital for maintenance teams to ascertain the root causes of recurring issues to identify holes in their infrastructures or processes. An effective problem management approach helps you build resilience so you can withstand the challenges your airport faces and deliver excellent, safe experiences for travelers.

Effective problem management in airport

How ServiceDesk Plus helps airports streamline maintenance efforts

Establish a unified service management platform to maintain all the aspects of your airport's IT and non-IT infrastructures.

React to critical issues faster with a robust incident management platform

Equip maintenance teams with the right tools to manage issues on a single platform and keep airport operations running while minimizing disruptions.

  • Manage and track all incidents on a central console to help maintenance teams address issues that arise across the airport, from displays and boarding pass scanners to luggage belts, with ServiceDesk Plus' multichannel incident logging.
  • Leverage powerful automations, like Business Rules or the Technician Auto Assign option, to route tickets to the right technicians or vendors instantly without requiring any human input.
  • Create various specialized teams via technician groups and route relevant tickets to them.
  • Offer users and technicians an intuitive way to report and track issues, assets, and services with ServiceDesk Plus' customizable self-service portal.
  • Allow your field technicians to take our service management platform with them via our powerful mobile app for both Android and iOS. This empowers them to easily update tickets after issues have been resolved and to report issues they encounter in the field.
IT incident management platform
Airport asset tracking

Track airport assets in one place to maximize visibility and manageability

Gain complete visibility into IT and non-IT assets via a central inventory for better, easier management.

  • Manage and track all mission-critical assets, like check-in devices, boarding pass scanners, luggage belts and scanners, weather sensors, and information displays, in one place with multiple scanning methods.
  • Associate incident tickets with assets to track problematic assets and identify all the assets and services that are involved in an issue.
  • Construct a bird's-eye view of the airport's IT and non-IT infrastructures by mapping configuration item relationships with the CMDB and build business maps for mission-critical services.
  • Create customizable asset dashboards to graphically track key metrics in one place.

Unify airport maintenance efforts with powerful IT management integrations

Adopt a proactive approach to airport maintenance by leveraging ServiceDesk Plus' powerful integrations with a variety of IT management tools. Take command of any issues concerning mission-critical services and endpoints.

  • Integrate with powerful network monitoring applications like ManageEngine OpManager to instantly identify mission-critical assets or services that are malfunctioning and to automatically create tickets for them in ServiceDesk Plus to alert the maintenance team and initiate incident response.
  • Integrate with unified endpoint management applications like ManageEngine Endpoint Central to track, manage, and update vital endpoints (like check-in workstations) and to automatically create tickets for issues in ServiceDesk Plus.
  • Proactively monitor applications via an integration with ManageEngine Applications Manager that tracks the performance and user experience of important applications and infrastructure components.
  • Manage user privileges via integrations with privilege management solutions like ManageEngine PAM360 to run a tight ship and ensure that only privileged users have access to important systems and data.
ServiceDesk Plus integrations
Change enablement

Minimize service disruptions with well-defined change enablement

Let poorly planned changes be a thing of the past with multistage change enablement in ServiceDesk Plus.

  • Leverage change enablement to clearly define implementation plans, back-out plans, and impact details for smooth rollouts of changes to the airport's infrastructures.
  • Implement authorized changes by involving key stakeholders throughout the entire change process with powerful change workflows.
  • Imbue powerful automations across the change workflows to automate various actions.
  • Control the level of access that users have to changes with
    change roles.

Build resilience by getting to the bottom of major issues with problem management

Strengthen processes and infrastructures by eliminating underlying issues that can lead to major disruptions.

  • Initiate problem tickets to perform root cause analysis (RCA), which involves identifying underlying issues that need to be fixed to prevent major issues from recurring.
  • Adopt a holistic approach by associating incident tickets that initiated a problem ticket and changes that need to be implemented to overcome underlying issues.
  • Standardize the RCA process and establish standard operating procedures for how problems need to be handled with ServiceDesk Plus' problem life cycles.
Problem lifecycle management

Join top airports around the world in streamlining IT and non-IT maintenance operations with ServiceDesk Plus, the service desk for airport management

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