Manchester Airport uses BI to back baggage rule change

Manchester Airport is using business intelligence (BI) software to help manage passenger flows through security after becoming one of the first UK airports to once again allow people to take more than one item of hand baggage on flights.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has lifted the hand baggage limit - put in place back in August 2006 - at 22 UK airports who have demonstrated that relaxing the rules will not have a significant impact on passenger movement.

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Manchester has used Oracle BI software to show the DfT that it has the necessary resources to cope with the change.

Martin Bell, a business consultant for the Manchester Airports Group information services team, told silicon.com: "We've taken data from numerous third-party systems and operational systems around the airport and consolidated it on an Oracle database and we're employing Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Portal over the top of that."

He added: "We were able to demonstrate using the Oracle toolset that we had the reporting and BI in place to be able to track passenger flows through outbound control [security]."

He explained the tech allows the team to show passenger peaks and flows graphically and that the airport has sufficient resources to take on the extra workload.

Bell said: "We needed to demonstrate internally and externally to the DFT that if there is a problem today we can fix it tomorrow effectively, by looking at the flows through the airport.

"We've made sure that we've resourced adequately for the two-bag rule as a result of the business intelligence that we've received from using Oracle."