Tahamidur Rahman may not work with Sugar Land residents directly in his role as the City’s Interim IT Manager, but you feel the impacts of his work as soon as you set foot in the Sugar Land Regional Airport.
Rahman, in collaboration with staff from the airport, has created a new service app where pilots flying into SLRA will be able to request services like fuel, lavatory, and towing before they touch down on our runway.
In the past, these services would be manually requested after an aircraft touched down, often leading to extended wait times. With this new system, airport line crew get the information that need online ahead of time so they can efficiently serve customers.
“It was an incredibly collaborative process,” Rahman said. “All the work was done by me in-house, so we were able to save some money because of that and by using the resources and products we already had access to internally to create a new system. They took it, and they embraced it.”
The cost of investment in this app was low. Because Rahman was able to use programs and systems already provided by the City, the only purchases needed were six phones capable of taking aircraft requests, plus cases to protect the phones and service lines. The true test came in how much time could be saved.
Over a seven-day trial period, the airport received approximately 297 service requests from pilots flying in. After receiving the request, line crew was able to complete each ticket in five to 10 minutes – a savings of approximately 198 hours of work each month.
“Now, we have all of this information that we thought we were collecting before but it was all manual so we couldn’t use those metrics,” Rahman said. “Now we know when the plane is coming in, what day they’re coming, what time they’re coming, so we can efficiently schedule people for the specific (shift). No request goes unseen because we have an automated tracker that is tracking who is doing what.”
Approximately 792 hours of staff time is saved every quarter thanks to the aircraft request app, totaling a cost savings of $17,424.
The app has been fully deployed since last year, and the airport line crew is now able to more focus on other items in their day-to-day roles, allowing them to be more efficient and effective in their work.
“That’s a win for me,” Rahman said. “I think innovation is finding new value in whatever you have, and if you’re not innovating, and if you’re not trying a new way to do something – a more efficient way – then you’re not growing.”