Problem – Owing to the current business scenario, many people in the travel and hospitality industry have lost their jobs, which is not only affecting their lives but is also affecting the local economies. With the new normal setting in and world opening up, we believe the organizations particularly the airlines might find themselves in an operational challenge of finding crew who would service the craft, primarily driven by the local quarantine requirement, which varies from location to location. We believe that, this challenge presents us with an opportunity to manage the airline’s operational needs by providing opportunity to the locally available and capable talent to augment the operational capabilities. This also aligns with the theme of “Sustainability and Relief” that the Travel Scrum Hackathon has highlighted.
Solution:
We aim to build an intelligence backed Marketplace engine, which would help airlines uncover their resource shortfall while factoring in the parameters such as local quarantine requirements and automatically match them with most suitable candidates based on the experience and operational requirements which includes the crew available to fly from various organizations, extending their partnership beyond Loyalty points for flyers .
For Airlines , This is will augment the on-demand operational needs of the airline while optimizing cost and avoiding last minute hiring rush along with earning from their unutilized staff which have got impacted to route cancellations or grounded flights.
For employees and potential candidates, beyond job security, this structure will also provide an earning opportunity in the current tough time and may be a future flexible earning option in case they wish to continue with the same model of employment.
Kronos has various possibilities of expansion with a possible augmentation of the airlines hiring process and a consumer engagement model with simplified itinerary planning.
Kronos is envisioned to have following components that would form the complete solution outline.
Matching Engine – An always-learning candidate-matching engine that takes into account the location guidelines; Aircraft operational requirements and the crew qualification.
Marketplace – A discovery tool bringing together various airline organization to connect their available and eligible crew with others enterprises and a promotion mechanism for the candidates to make themselves visible for an opportunity.
How we built it?
We built Kronos with a Design Thinking based approach and taking the below journey of evolution:
Explored and captured the understanding of users, consumers, the market and the eco-system. Since we did not have direct access to the airline staff or crew members, we worked with our Mentors, treating them as proxy users and capturing further information from secondary research provided by various resources.
Identified opportunities of intervention where we could achieve win-win scenario for Airlines, consumers, employees and the potential candidates. We achieved this via journey mapping exercise where we captured the expectations of different user groups involved and their pain points in current environment to manage.
Ideated on what could be possible solutions that we could create and shortlisted the one with the most potential to scale and succeed. The validation was done along with our mentor to make sure that we are moving away from our core observed theme.
Prototyped the experience to gather the feedback and create a north star for us to work our POC towards. The Prototype was aimed to highlight and communicate most critical part of the idea and to capture validation from our mentors to make sure the developed component is in right direction
Designed and developed a working technical POC to highlight the feasibility of the idea and highlight essential components of operation including the visual of the market place and the algorithm connecting the pieces together.
What are we Proud of? While there are various things that we are proud of, the one thing that takes the cake is our passion and drive for the idea, which powered us to come this far in just 3 days of time. A very close second (which I am trying to sneak in ) is the collaborative spirit in our team to independently craft components, which come together like magic at the end.
What is the next step for our solution and our approach? As now we have a demonstrable component to validate and get feedback on our idea, we would ideally want to collaborate with Airlines such as Turkish Airlines and their partners or Airline solution providers such as Sabre or Amadeus to build a POC on live data to showcase the art of the possible in the real sandbox environment. By being a part of this hackathon, we have already taken our first step to make a possible connect, while we do that, we will also look at enhancing our showcase to provide more comprehensive view of possibilities.
What Tech Did we use to build? The build of our POC contains of three elements 1- Experience Design We crafted our North Star to reflect for how our applications would look like and provide the life to the idea. This was achieved via the following set of tools:
- Adobe XD
- Photoshop
- Premiere Pro
- After Effects
2- Backend Engine and API We simulated the potential data sources and created entries, which could provide our engine the baseline. We aim to expand this component by bringing in ML pieces for learning and optimal recommendation. The components in backend are developed in java using spring MVC architecture for building RESTful services. We used MYSQL database to store, manage and manipulate data.
3- Front End / UI The design components were structured on the web pages with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the visual effects, design and styling for the website were achieved with CSS (Cascade Styling Sheets). Activities and functionalities were implemented with Javascript.
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