Data strategy for airline catering operations

Most inflight catering operations do not have a data problem. They have data that never meets.

Orders sit in finance. Departures sit in the flight schedule. Production sits in the kitchen and recipe system, stock sits in the warehouse, delivery sits with dispatch. Each of them is right about its own patch. Ask a question that crosses two of them and somebody assembles the answer by hand, which means it is only as good as the person who assembled it and only holds until the next time somebody asks.

The data nobody is holding

There is a second gap and it sits underneath the systems rather than between them. Equipment moves. People carry things across the floor, wait, redo work, shift stock from one place to another. None of it is recorded anywhere, because no system was ever asked to record it, and it is a large part of what the operation actually costs.

Connect the existing systems and you get something that looks complete. It still cannot tell you where the effort goes.

Why the foundation comes first

Demand forecasting, predictive maintenance, a business case for automation. All of them rest on the same thing underneath. Continuous data, granular enough and old enough to mean something. Without it the project still produces an answer, and nobody in the operation is able to defend it.

Key figures fail the same way. A number built on an incomplete base gets quietly ignored by the people it is meant to steer. The reporting carries on because it was agreed, not because anyone is using it.

What a data foundation actually is

It is not a product you buy and switch on. Another system placed on top of the existing ones is simply another island.

It is two pieces of work. Connecting what is already there, and capturing what is currently unrecorded. Skip the second and the hidden part of the process stays hidden, which is the part you were trying to see.

And it has to sit outside any one supplier's product. Otherwise the next decision has been made for you before you got round to asking the question.

A sequence that works

1Measure the data you already have. Quality, granularity, how far back it goes.
2Decide which unrecorded events matter and make them recordable.
3Connect the existing systems through clean interfaces.
4Only then put reporting, forecasting and automation cases on top.

The order is the whole point. Start at step four, which is where most programmes start because that is where the visible benefit is, and you spend the rest of the project defending a result instead of using one. The automation question runs on the same logic, which we set out in where automation pays in a flight kitchen.

Where we sit

DSC-Consult does not sell equipment and does not develop or operate software. We define the software strategy, run the vendor selection together with the client and implement the selected third-party system as part of the overall project delivery.

Vendor neutrality is the difference that matters here. We do not carry a product of our own into the project, so the foundation gets designed around the operation rather than around what one supplier happens to sell.

Frequently asked questions

What does a data strategy mean for an airline catering operation?

Deciding which data the operation needs, where it comes from and how the pieces fit, before anybody picks a tool. It covers the foundation, the interfaces between the systems that already exist, and the events that nothing records today.

We already have several systems. Why is that not enough?

Because each one is right about its own part and none of them holds the whole picture. Finance knows the orders, the flight schedule knows the departures, the kitchen system knows production, the warehouse knows stock. A question that crosses two of those areas has no owner.

Which data is typically missing in a flight kitchen?

The events between the systems. Equipment movements, manual work steps, internal transfers, waiting and rework. They drive a lot of the cost and there is no report on any of them, because nothing was ever set up to capture them.

Do we need to replace our existing systems?

Usually not. The systems are rarely wrong, they are unconnected, and replacing them solves a problem you do not have. The work is connecting them properly and adding capture where there is none. Replacement only comes up where a system cannot deliver an interface at all.

Does DSC-Consult build the data platform?

Who you would be working with

"We have found DSC-Consult to be a highly experienced & supportive partner, with a deep understanding of the inflight catering & food service industries."

Gareth LycettVP-Inflight CateringCATRION, Saudi Arabia