Overnight Success for High Fliers Working on Airport Contract

NEWCASTLE International Airport and its strategic IT business partner Waterstons are to represent the North of England in leading computing awards.

The companies have been shortlisted for the Best Small Business IT Strategy Award at the Computing Awards for Excellence, organised by Computing magazine. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on November 7.

The work put forward for the award is just one element of the airport’s four-year IT strategy, which was drawn up by Waterstons and the airport’s senior management team in 2003. Its purpose was to support the airport’s continued growth by improving efficiency and providing critical management information.

Waterstons has project managed and implemented leading-edge technologies including Sap, a new PABX telephony system and an interactive voice recognition system to handle telephone calls from the public.

In addition, the flight information system (Fids) has been improved and a new stand planning tool has been introduced to manage aircraft movement while they are on the ground at Newcastle International.

The work put forward for the award was the project management of the upgrade of the airport’s flight information system, which is critical to the day-to-day running of the airport.

The system provides the flight information that is displayed to passengers in the terminal building, on the airport’s website, Ceefax, Teletext, in hotels and via the airport’s telephone help system.

The system is relied on by passengers, air traffic control, airside operations, customer services and finance. It is also used to export data into the airport’s Sap system for billing and management reporting.

Because of the critical nature of the system, it was vital the upgrade took place after the last flight of the day and before the check-in desks opened for passengers the following day.

Newcastle Airport’s IT support manager Darren Kelly said: "This project was – quite literally – an overnight success. The achievement was testament to months of planning and preparation, training, testing and retesting and gaining user buy-in from the departments affected.

"We are thrilled that the hard work put in by Waterstons has been shortlisted for such a prestigious award and look forward to getting the results in November."

(c) 2007 The Journal – Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.