Lufthansa Systems upgrades capabilities of NetLine/Crew

In order to meet the specific requirements of airlines in the United States, Lufthansa Systems has added new capabilities to its established crew management solution NetLine/Crew. It now supports the seniority-based preferential bidding used by U.S. airlines for crew rostering. This enables airlines in North America to join more than 40 carriers worldwide using NetLine/Crew successfully in their daily operations.

North American rules and regulations for posting and accepting crew requests vary from those of other regions and therefore require a customized approach. The new module was developed in cooperation with California-based IT-specialist Crewing Solutions. Thanks to its specific optimization tool it reduces the effort and costs of the planning process, thus enhancing the financial and operational benefits of NetLine/Crew.

“Making NetLine/Crew available to airlines in North America is an important step in our product strategy. Crew management is a key airline process, yet it is extremely complex due to the countless rules and regulations set by authorities, unions and other parties. NetLine/Crew offers a perfect way to manage this complex job and make operations more efficient,” explains Stefan Auerbach, Senior Vice President Airline Solutions at Lufthansa Systems.

An efficient crew roster is not only key to smooth and profitable operations. It is also an important element of crew satisfaction. Creating a profitable and feasible roster starts with the calculation of manpower demands and continues with the creation of efficient duty blocks of varying length (pairings). During crew assignment, legal and contractual regulations, economic considerations as well as the need for supervision and recurrent crew training requirements must be taken into account, while the crew’s wishes and preferences should have direct impact. NetLine/Crew supports this via roster requests and trip trading options through a web-based crew information service. In crew tracking, quick response is essential when searching for alternative solutions and reacting to problems caused by irregular operations. Direct information for the crew members is also important as it relieves the crew management departments of a lot of work.

NetLine/Crew supports the entire crew management process, covering all phases from pairing construction to crew rostering to crew tracking and post-flight activities. It provides planners and controllers with a set of decision support tools that enables them to focus on creating and maintaining efficient and employee-friendly duty rosters. NetLine/Crew ensures the efficient use of crew resources and warns of violated legalities, during both planning and actual operation. It accelerates the crew management process, reduces workload and minimizes errors by generating pairings and rosters automatically. By using NetLine/Crew airlines are able to reduce crew-related costs such as personnel (overtime and standby pay), travel (hotel and transportation, allowances) and training (simulator). With NetLine/Crew products, airlines can increase their productivity by up to five percent, which results in savings of up to 10 million dollars a year for a medium-sized airline.

NetLine/Crew is part of Lufthansa Systems’ NetLine planning and control suite. It covers all aspects from network planning and scheduling to crew management and operations control. With NetLine airlines can evaluate the outcome of scenarios, plans, and decisions quickly and reliably. This is possible because NetLine puts a strong focus on automation and optimization tools that speed up planning and operational processes, save costs, improve revenues, and provide consistent robustness and stability. NetLine/Crew is also a key component of Lufthansa Systems’ Integrated Operations Control Center (IOCC). Platform.