I participated in a school Deloitte partnership project where the client was the US Transportation Security Administration (tsa) who faced issues with inefficiencies in creating airport schedules and a heavy manual workload when working shifts due to employee absences.
My task is to create an intelligent scheduling system, smart for TSA, and create two applications (desktop and mobile). The desktop port provides the TSA manager with intelligent management and generation of shift schedules, where the manager can supervise, activate schedules, and assign officers.
The new system shortened the original 2-month scheduling time to 1 week, greatly improving operational efficiency, reducing manual workload, and improving the accuracy of the airport schedule.
• Reduced a complex, 2-month airport scheduling process to one week
• Improved flexibility and quick response
• Reduced request handling process
1.Creating 'THE SCHEDULE'
Crafting the TSA schedule involves analyzing complex data like passenger lists and traffic and currently depends heavily on manual input and review by managers, requiring planning a month in advance.
2. Managing Leave Requests
Currently, when employees request leave, managers must manually adjust the schedule, adding or reducing staff as needed. This process increases workload and adds complexity to the system.
TSA Managers
• Coordinate operations and staff
• Use Excel to schedule shifts
• Make schedules
• Assign missing officers
TSA Officers
• Conduct security screenings
• 3 shifts
This section will be covered in TSA Officer Application >
1. Large Amount of Manual Input
Managers currently rely on manual Excel spreadsheets to manage schedules, a time-consuming process that increases the risk of errors.
2. Adding on manual work of absence
Officers find requesting leave inconvenient, as they must input their time preferences on a single computer, and these leave variables burden the existing scheduling system.
AI smart system
With the AI smart system, we should have a way to have the airport manager use digital products, not just human manual work
Creating and monitoring schedules
Assign missing officers
Feature 1 - Creating and monitoring schedules
1. How the Automate System works?
In order to fully understand the operational logic of this system, I decided to use three swim-lane diagrams to demonstrate that, which I feel can describe the whole process clearly. There are a lot of interactions between the system and data flow, and more
In designing the architecture for the schedule and detail pages, I confronted the challenge of airport scheduling head-on.
The task was to make sense of the myriad of assignments—thousands in just one week—and present them in an intelligible format for office managers.
My thought process led me to question the hierarchy of information: whether to prioritize lanes, positions, or time slots...
Use concourse/lane as unit
Officers find requesting leave inconvenient, as they must input their time preferences on a single computer, and these leave variables burden the existing scheduling system.
Providing a clear overview
Providing a detailed view
Highlight - the upcoming schedule and the current schedule.
• The task was to make sense of the myriad of assignments—thousands in just one week—and present them in an intelligible format for office managers. My thought process led me to question the hierarchy of information: whether to prioritize lanes, positions, or time slots...
Multiple entry points for the manager to locate missing officers.
• A reminder with numbers
• Tell the office manager how much work they have to do.
Sorting by the concourse and status
• Helps them realize how many things they need to understand about the schedules, the loaded schedules, or the status of positions.
We clearly laid out the information on these 2 pages. A major task managers need to finish with this clear layout pages about
Activating schedules
4. Active schedules
• When managers select a row, they're looking to activate the schedule.
But here's the catch: we've got to make sure every required position is filled before they can hit that 'Activate' button and set the schedule in motion.
• So, if a manager selects a row and it shows any positions missing an officer, the 'Activate' button stays disabled.
• It's a crucial safeguard, ensuring no schedule goes live without full staffing.
5.Detail page design
Narrow it down to individual weekdays, simplifying the task of filling in the scheduling gaps.
• In the detail page, the key task for officers is to resolve the issue of missing staff.
• The most crucial step for managers handling missing officer slots is to first identify the specific times, dates, and positions that are unstaffed so they can assign the right person for the job.
Calendar view
General understanding
Feature 2 - Assign missing officers
1. How the Automate System works?
• In the final steps of our task management, the central aim is to identify and address any missing officers from the schedule.
• With the clear layout we designed above, the manager was able to figure out how to appoint the missing officer easily
• One important thing is that sometimes the system is not able to figure out or ultimately replace the missing officer or find the shift for the replacement. This is the main call that our managers need to deal with. And here's the whole logic with the whole missing officer scenarios.
(This section will be covered in TSA SMART (Officer Application)
The system is designed to assign officers automatically in most situations.
Manager intervention is only necessary in exceptional cases where the system fails to find a replacement.
These instances are infrequent but crucial, ensuring no position goes unfilled.
Managers' main task is to monitor the system's status.
Only in rare and specific circumstances must managers manually handle replacements.
Monitoring
Manual
The TSA Officer module empowers staff to personalize their shift preferences and efficiently manage urgent leave requests.