Luton Airport, 28 miles to the north of London, serves millions of passengers travelling to Europe, Asia and northern Africa. The airport had meteoric growth thanks to the attractiveness to airlines of its highly efficient passenger process. Traveller numbers rocketed, making it the UK’s fifth largest airport. But despite this success, the airport was facing challenges with managing and accessing its data. Challenges which The Server Labs helped them solve.

An airport is potentially a rich source of operational data - data which, if captured, accessed, interrogated and analysed offers deep insights that enable the airport to run more efficiently.
However, Luton Airport was not able to harness the power of their operational data to support decision making, due to several challenges:
• Data disconnect - Luton Airport’s data was stored in a range of systems, locations and formats. It couldn’t be connected to form a whole, cohesive picture.
• Legacy systems - like many airports, Luton relied on legacy technology and processes, which were not designed for ease of data access and analysis. These systems also created a barrier to adopting modern industry standard technologies.
• Skills barrier - Luton, as a location, is not a hub of technology expertise and the airport struggled to find staff with the required level of technical skills and experience, or to offer the career progression opportunities that would attract them.
• Lean workforce - with the primary investment focus being on passenger processing and safety, the IT side of the operation was run very leanly, for example, with no in-house development team to build bespoke systems.
Luton Airport was, at that time, a ‘data poor’ organisation, albeit one with the potential to be just the opposite.

After going to market in an open European-wide tender, the airport selected The Server Labs as the partner to help them meet their challenges. TSL presented a tailored solution that was not only a good technical fit but also took into account the pace of change that the business could manage, and the geographic situation of the airport.
The Server Labs designed and implemented the solution in three stages:
1. Build a core data management infrastructure, using Google Cloud.
2. Develop an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) system to take all relevant airport data, transform it into consistent, accessible formats, and load it into a Business Information (BI) operations dashboard.
3. Build dashboards that allow commercial and operations staff to search, interrogate and analyse the data.
Throughout the project, they built the solution alongside the airport’s own three-strong team, in a ‘dual delivery and upskilling’ approach.

The insights unlocked by The Server Labs’ solution have transformed airport operations:
• Operational teams have access to the data they’d always wanted, and, in some cases to data they didn’t even know was available.
• They can interrogate and interpret the data to develop new ways of working and optimise airport operations.
• They can use the data to look forwards with predictive reporting and analyse past events with root cause analysis.
• Access to the right data, at the right time, in the right format has saved the airport time and money, reduced disruption and enhanced passenger safety and travelling experience.