On 24 November 2009, the starting shot was fired for a contract for a new GroundStar project, signed by Ignacio Garrido, managing director of Flightcare and a group of other Flightcare representatives from Belgium, Spain and Italy.
A framework agreement has been signed for another long-term partnership with INFORM. During a ceremony at the INFORM booth at the Barcelona Airport Exchange exhibition the future collaboration was sealed by Mr Garrido and INFORM’s director of business development Carlos Sanjuan.
Flightcare’s decision makers had been impressed by GroundStar’s wide functionality, its flexibility of integration and its ability to provide central management of multiple stations over three countries.
Following detailed analysis of the three countries’ requirements for integrating their existing IT infrastructure, and the desire to harmonise existing resource management solutions into a more modern application, GroundStar was chosen to improve all processes, from strategic planning to final invoicing of all Flightcare’s operations. The goal is to use GroundStar from Flightcare’s headquarters and IT base in Madrid to centrally manage the diverse ground handling activities at a large group of airports.
In each country the range of applications is composed of various GroundStar Core Modules such as GS Planning, GS Rostering, GS RealTime and GS CRM in addition to multiple application and a variety of integration packages at the various stations. Seasonal and the daily flight schedule processing modules are also envisaged.
The project will be first rolled out at Flightcare’s Brussels airport operation, where GroundStar will be responsible for the management of about 1,200 staff in both passenger and ramp services areas. The full implementation will be divided into phases, with Barcelona Airport and various smaller operations in Spain being next in line after Brussels Airport, and will be completed with the installation of GroundStar at Flightcare’s two Italian operations: Fiumicino and Ciampino airports in Rome.
Taking a view of the whole project, GroundStar will eventually manage around 3,500 full-time equivalent employees at 12 airports across Europe.