Lufthansa Group is working with Celonis to improve the passenger experience

Flying can be an intimidating, stressful, tiring, exciting or joyful experience – depending not only on the passenger involved, but also on the events that take place during that passenger’s journey. A routine business trip can be turned upside down by a 30-minute flight delay. Or a family’s annual vacation could be ruined by an airline losing all the group’s luggage. Typically, airlines do their best with an extremely complex network of different operators, relying on everyone to do their part as efficiently as possible. But as most of us know, things can and do go wrong.

However, Lufthansa Group believes that it can reduce these less than desirable outcomes for its passengers by making better use of the data made available to it. The group – which consists of a number of airlines, including Lufthansa and Swiss Air – has adopted Celonis’ process mining platform to not only better understand processes, but also improve data use and data quality.

Lufthansa alone operated 950,000 flights last year, transporting more than 122 million passengers and 65 million pieces of luggage to more than 310 destinations worldwide. It’s an incredibly complex operation; an operation that the company believes can be tightened with better insight into the systems that support it, such as those of Amadeus, SBH and SITA.

At a recent Celonis event in Munich, Robin Plitzko, Operations Performance Manager, Lufthansa Group, explained why this is so important to the experience of the passengers who use its airlines for travel:

Picture this: You’re at the airport, excited about your trip. You check in online and now you are ready to board, but suddenly you are standing in a long line waiting for the boarding process. Your flight has gone smoothly, but you wait anxiously at the baggage claim for what seems like an eternity. Frustrating, isn’t it?

For millions of our passengers, these small moments can define their travel experience, both positive and negative. And that’s where we at Lufthansa Group come in: process mining helps us streamline these moments and turn potential pain points into smooth and efficient processes.

Lufthansa Group started working with Celonis in 2018. Today it has what it describes as a “vibrant” Celonis community, with more than 500 people working with the platform across the Group. There are approximately 50+ use cases active across 12 different business units.

The challenge of lost luggage

Speaking alongside Plitzko was his colleague Amin Riahi, Senior Manager Group Operations, Lufthansa Group, who outlined one of the key use cases that Lufthansa has focused on as an airline when using Celonis: lost luggage. He said:

When you arrive in Munich or any other airport, you go to the conveyor belt and all you want to do is pick up your bag and go home or to your hotel. You go to the conveyor belt, wait there and it gets exciting. The bags roll down and roll down, and the moment hits you: unfortunately your bag is not there.

The next logical step in this ‘customer journey’ is of course to speak to the Lufthansa service center at the airport, where Lost and Found staff will try to reassure you that your bag will be found. But as Riahi explained, there’s a good chance the employees – and the airline – won’t know where the bag is or what went wrong at the time:

Behind the scenes, for us as an airline, with a very complex system with millions of suitcases that we handle every day, thousands of different systems that we use and thousands of people who work for us and with us, it is not easy for us either. That’s because we don’t always know what happened to the bag.

At that time we cannot say where the bag is, why the bag is delayed and what happened? Is it still at the airport where you left? Who made the mistake? What really happened? The real case right now is that we know two things. The first is that we know we’ve created a bad experience. A bad feeling for our guests, for our passengers. And you will remember that.

The second is that you are angry because we do not have the answers at our fingertips to provide a satisfactory service to our passengers. And this is where Celonis comes into the picture. Celonis is not a system for locating missing bags. It is a process mining powerhouse, allowing us to gain very deep insights into our processes.

Riahi described how Celonis allows Lufthansa to get a comprehensive view of the passenger baggage journey, to see what’s happening and where the airline is failing. For example, the Celonis platform in Vienna has mapped the entire process and integrated it with the variety of systems that support the complex baggage handling processes. What Lufthansa could see was that in Vienna there were many loading errors at the ground stations, which was one of the main reasons why the bags were left behind in the city. Riahi said:

If you have a flight connection in Vienna where the connection time is 45 minutes, if you don’t do this correctly the bag will never have a chance to arrive. In Vienna you can do anything you want, but you won’t make it. It’s somewhere else.

We now have an overview. We can talk to the stations. We can monitor performance and take action to improve that process. And at this step it helps us a lot to improve the quality of the transfer bags.

The second case of lost luggage comes from Zurich, where Lufthansa found that the conveyor belts in Zurich were overloaded and some of them were more likely to fail at certain times. Riahi said:

We have been able to find out which conveyor belts are more likely to fail and we can predict them. The central message now is that we no longer react to the problems, but can prevent them.

Celonis does not look at just one system, but uses several systems – from the check-in system, the baggage handling system, baggage handlers, flight schedules, aircraft standing position, and so on – to arrive at one answer. to one question, always. So that’s the power of Celonis, which can streamline and summarize the entire information to give us the answers we’re looking for.

Boarding efficiency

Another example of Celonis being used to understand the airline group’s efficiency is the way Lufthansa uses process mining to optimize its approach to boarding. Lufthansa uses a similar approach to other airlines, boarding its passengers by group number. The first to board are people with reduced mobility and passengers with babies, followed by first class passengers, then business class passengers and finally economy class guests.

According to Plitzko, the thinking behind this approach was clear:

There are many more entry methods. But why did we choose this entry method because it is the most efficient for us? First, it reduces congestion at the gate and on the plane, by giving people who take a little longer to board a plane a little more time.

This obviously leads to faster boarding in general. It also adds to the passenger experience because our First and Business Class guests pay more for their seats, so they should have the privilege of boarding a little earlier so that their service can begin.

And overall, this boarding method should improve on-time departures and thus increase operational efficiency.

The problem, however, was that since the introduction of this boarding by group methodology, there was no way to monitor its effectiveness. In fact, no attempt was made to even check whether the stations at the gates were complying with the approach at all. Lufthansa actually decided to build a proof of concept to monitor this at a Celonis Hackathon day in Frankfurt, to analyze the process for the first time. It took second place at that hackathon, which encouraged it to develop the use case even further. Plitzko said:

Working closely with our process owner, we defined some rules and conditions to be applied so that we knew what we wanted to measure and also where there are exceptions to the boarding process. For example between continental and intercontinental flights.

All these insights, all the data, resulted in some dashboards, where today we have general insights into the process. For example, if priority boarding is followed correctly, we will know which stations have multiple boarding group openings – this already helps us to improve these stations, where overall positive compliance is quite low.

Advice

Considering that the Lufthansa Group has so many active process mining users across the organization, as well as dozens of use cases, it is clear that the airline has identified multiple needs for the Celonis platform. That said, both Riahi and Plitzko said organizations need to be prepared to change the way they use their data, as well as developing stakeholder management principles.

For example, Plitzko said:

Data and data quality are a major problem, because without advanced data, no use case development and no analysis can take place. And here Celonis really showed us where data is missing or incomplete, which has now been cleaned up. Due to the increase in data quality, this also has some other effects on other departments.

As for the data point, Riahi also added:

We wonder: is Celonis a quick fix? Can we just apply Celonis and, boom, it works, and everything is fine? No, it’s not. But we know that Celonis process mining is a long-term investment in data, in insights, in operational excellence. So invest in it. But the good news is that we are already seeing very good results.

And the final point in this context is that the magic of Celonis for us is not about the data, because data exists everywhere – it’s about the clarity of the data. In a complex sector like ours, in aviation, where a small delay can upset many passengers, have many consequences and affect thousands of passengers, clarity is invaluable to us.

And once these insights and data are presented to people, those people are still needed to make changes and collaborate effectively. Plitzko added:

Both of our use cases require cross-organization collaboration. There are many stakeholders involved who have their unique insights, their perspectives, and their opinions about the process – all of that needs to be reflected in some way.

We had to deal with sophisticated stakeholder management, so that progress does not slow down. Then our initial analysis revealed that there were many more use case ideas, which meant that at some point we had to prioritize these ideas so that we could allocate our scarce resources as efficiently as possible.