The specialist discipline of galley planning underpins supply chain cost and operational efficiency in often underestimated ways. With the need to understand complex networks, supply chains, and complex inflight experience options, the sometimes unenviable task of piecing together detailed galley plans can test even the most proven industry professionals.
For airlines experiencing growing network and inflight experience complexities, it is vital for management to arm their personnel with proven technology solutions. Touchpoint Technology offers new features to plan and implement standardisation and automation in ways not possible with spreadsheets or documents.
With complex aircraft frames, galley layouts and exceptions, planning consistent galley plan components can prove a genuine challenge. Agreeing equipment and products, calculating quantities and finding the right sort of standard unit or cart can easily create thousands of non-standard galley containers. With subtle differences in contents, a standard bar cart can quickly balloon out to dozens of versions. With traditional manual processes focusing on each individual plan, smaller variances often go unnoticed and unmeasured, leaving catering companies with expensive complexity.
Technology must play an increasing role in identifying standard components across galley plans, and alerting users to variances before galley plans are issued. For growing airlines, it may prove a costly mistake relying on manual processes and one or two key stakeholders.
With ever changing inflight experience planning, the idea of ‘set and forget’ galley plans is over. Where slow moving international flying alleviates workload, regional and domestic flying can drive constant changes to product settings, quantities and conditionality of loading generating multiple versions of plans in short time frames.
Working alongside airline customers, the Touchpoint product division have analysed thousands of galley plan changes. Research shows the driver of efficiency lies in allowing personnel to make changes at the right level within the plans. Technology that allows users to alter drawers across all containers, rearrange drawers within a service cart across all plans, or simply swap a beverage cart for a retail cart provides a fast system solution to improve the manual update processes.
Carefully designed software built for the airline industry offers new opportunities for airline management to drive efficiency in their supply chains. With a new approach to component creation, authorisation and versioning, improved efficiency outcomes are guaranteed with our latest software. With a brand new offering for the industry, Touchpoint offers customers a fresh approach to galley planning using the latest technology platform.
As providers of galley planning software to the industry, Touchpoint are pleased to announce the release of Galley Manager 2.0 to the airline industry for 1 December 2016. The Galley Manager 2.0 software is an integrated component of the Touchpoint Catering Management Solution.
Justin Cook is a product specialist at Touchpoint, an Australian based inflight software provider. As a consultant to airline customers, Justin is a contributor to the overall software features of the latest galley plan management product.
