airline, travel, airport

JFK International Air Terminal (JFKIAT), operator of Terminal 4 at JFK Airport, is well underway in its journey to better use data to transform its operations and enhance passenger experience. As the largest terminal at JFK, forecast to handle around 28 million passengers this year, JFKIAT recognized that improving its data analytics would be a key enabler in its strategic goals.

The challenges JFKIAT faced, however, were significant. Steve Tukavkin, vice president of IT and Digital at JFKIAT, explained, “We struggled with fragmented data silos across various parts of our business. This hindered the decision-making processes in business and operations decisions. The lack of a centralized data system led to operational inefficiencies, such as longer passenger queuing times and suboptimal staff rostering.

“This hindered efficient decision-making processes and led to more gut-based decisions than data-driven ones,” Tukavkin said. JFKIAT sought to move to a more systematic way of measuring metrics and their key performance indicators.

JFKIAT turned to information technology services and consulting provider Wipro to address these challenges. Wipro helped to design and implement a cloud-focused data strategy that leverages Microsoft’s Azure Data Platform. Tukavkin described the vision as a “digital intelligence control tower” aimed at providing “end-to-end visibility of the entire terminal processes, providing proactive intelligence and recommendations, potentially helping with scenario planning in the future.”

With about 70 data sources, getting to where they wanted to be wouldn’t come easy.

“The main objective of this capability is to provide end-to-end visibility of the entire terminal and its processes, even providing proactive intelligence and recommendations, potentially helping us with scenario planning in the future,” he said. “We wanted a single source of truth for our data and, more importantly, our insights,” Tukavkin added.

Building their digital intelligence control tower became based on a three-year plan focused on four key factors: Metrics for better data-based decisions, data management and governance, technology infrastructure and analytics workgroups for reporting and dashboard management. JFKIAT identified 21 use cases, with nine completed so far, resulting in approximately 25 reports and dashboards implemented in production.

One notable use case is the development of a sustainability dashboard. Wipro assessed JFKOAT’s greenhouse gas emissions and developed a carbon reduction roadmap. Tukavkin has automated data collection for their gas, electric and fuel acquisition using the new data system. “We started to automatically extract the data sets from those invoices using Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence,” he said.

Looking to the future, JFKIAT plans to leverage Microsoft Copilot to enable employees to use natural language queries to create deeper insights from existing dashboards and reports. The company also aims to focus on improving non-aviation revenue streams and enhancing customer experience in the project’s next phase.

The initiative has yielded valuable lessons so far. Tukavkin emphasized the importance of managing expectations and securing commitment from all business units: “We needed everyone’s involvement. We can’t do this ourselves from just a technology perspective. We don’t own all the data. Various business units own the data, and we needed their support and commitment to be part of this program.”

Finally, Tukavkin stressed the need to focus on data governance, models and cleaning processes to ensure the data used is accurate and reliable. “The team recognized that they needed to “crawl, walk, then run” when implementing AI and advanced analytics.

For Tukavkin, there’s no turning back to gut decision-making again. “We’re becoming more of a data-driven organization, and I’ve already seen significant productivity improvement. We’ve automated a lot of the static reporting we previously manually created, so now we have more time to assess and analyze information with the right knowledge to enhance our decision-making and operational processes,” Tukavkin said.