From 25 October, Vienna Airport’s second ground handling licence is held by Joint Sky Services, replacing Airline Assistance Switzerland (AAS). The licence covers baggage, cargo and mail handling and ramp services. Under the plan, ramp staff move to the new provider with their existing rights and seniority, and AAS continues passenger handling as a subcontractor. According to press reports, a legally binding agreement was still not in place in the final weeks.
We do not know exactly how the handover is going in Vienna, and this post is not about that. The case is interesting because it makes visible something that happens at every tender and is rarely talked about.
What transfers, and what doesn’t
In a provider change, the contract usually transfers, the licence transfers, and with luck most of the staff transfer. All of that is documented.
What usually does not transfer:
- Real durations. How long a turnaround actually takes on a given stand, with a given aircraft type, at a given time of day. The standard time in the manual rarely matches.
- Unwritten constraints. Which stand needs more time because it is far from the baggage sorter. Which two people should not be on the same team. Which tug is slower. These live in the head of whoever builds the roster.
- Qualification history. Today’s state is not enough: in a dispute, what has to be shown is whether someone held the licence in March. That is a problem of its own, and a handover brings it to the surface.
- Performance history, in a form the next provider can read.
These typically sit in the outgoing provider’s systems, its spreadsheets, and the heads of one or two planners. The staff who transfer know a lot of it, but what they know is not in any system.
From the operator’s side
The operator writes the tender. The question is what it measures the bids against, and what it will measure the new provider against.
If the operator has so far seen performance through the provider’s own reports, the service levels in the new contract are built on the old provider’s own numbers. The new provider is then measured against a baseline the old one wrote about itself.
If the operator has its own measurement, three things change. The tender can be built on a measured baseline. Service levels can be set against how the operation really runs rather than against an estimated norm. And the incoming provider can be measured from day one with the same yardstick as the outgoing one, so it shows if something gets worse during the transition, and also if it gets better.
None of this needs optimization. It needs field capture, one shared data layer and a record of execution.
From the incoming provider’s side
The incoming provider gets the people and the contract, but has to rebuild the plan. In the first weeks it typically plans from standard times, because there is nothing else, and shift supervisors fix the roster on paper because they know what is real.
Two things shorten this period. The first is to write down what the transferring key people know as constraints as early as possible, and to name them as co-authors of the constraint model. The aim is that what they know is not only in their heads. The second is to start collecting execution data from day one, because every week without it is a week the plan runs on old assumptions.
What to put in the contract
Data ownership. Who owns the execution data, and in what format it is handed over when the contract ends. If this is not written down, the answer is usually that it belongs to the outgoing provider, in whatever format it happens to be in.
Parallel measurement during the transition. For a few weeks, measure the outgoing and incoming providers’ work with the same system, so the comparison is not two different reports set side by side.
Qualification records with history. The full history, not a snapshot of who was qualified for what on handover day.
Data protection. Handing over personal data about employees is a regulated matter. Hand over what you can in aggregate, and the rest with its legal basis settled from the start. This is not something to work out in the contract’s final week.
The next tender starts at signature
A ground handling licence runs for years; in Vienna, until 2033. What happens until then becomes the baseline for the next tender. If the operator still has no picture of its own by then, it will be where it is now at the next provider change.
Optimum Intelligence builds measurement and planning for airports and ground handlers, from field capture (Track · OptiTrack) through a shared data layer (Understand · OptiSight) and a record of execution (Manage · OptiCheck) to optimization (Optimise · erdosP-3). If you are facing a provider change, let’s talk.