I very much appreciate our customers' feedback and am happy to share Lorna Herda's words here. Her role at Skyguide is Head of Capacity Management and Route Charges Office Management Support & Business Planning Operations. Lorna and I have been working together for almost 10 years now.

"Skyguide has been using our customized DELMIA Quintiq Workforce Planner now since 2014, to plan about 800 operational staff working in the area of air traffic control. We are continuously enhancing our planning solution with new features, as it offers the flexibility to easily implement new functionalities, interfaces and working rules, as the environment and legal regulations change. We use the software for carrying out strategical staff planning, through the use of various optimisers that allow us to calculate the best roster covering the forecast air traffic demand, or rosters that take into account operational changes, such as new shifts lengths, as well as new Labour Law rules or internal staff planning rules. When producing the staff plans, we also use an optimiser that supports the planners in assigning the shifts to the employees, while respecting all the national laws and internal rules, and taking into account best rostering practices, as well as the preferences entered into the system by the employees. 

The interfacing possibilities allow us to feed the tool with input from other systems and in turn, to feed other systems with the staff planning information, thus reducing data duplication and human error, if these operations had to be carried out manually.

Last but not least, the almost infinite possibilities in terms of reporting allow the staff planners, management, human resources and finances to keep an overview on a variety of performance indicators and easily collect statistics, and this for all the operational units within Skyguide, in a few mouse clicks.

So after 10 years, the software is not only still very much in use, but will also be used by 12 additional units within the coming year, which will bring the total of employees planned by the DELMIA Quintiq Software to about 1000 operational staff, and thus covering all operational units within Skyguide."