Written by on Wednesday November 14th 2012 in Newsletter, Press Releases

A successful experience for Gatwick Airport.

We’ve noticed that when there are feature stories about simulation the main focus is usually about the success and benefits of the simulation or project. This story is slightly different; it’s about the way SIMUL8 Corporation’s consulting team works with its clients.

Gatwick Airport in London, England, is engaged in a long term plan to drive improvements for passengers, airlines and cost efficiency. Having used simulation previously, and other external consulting firms to provide input to their decision making process, the team at Gatwick have a lot of experience of getting external assistance with change management.

What’s different this time is SIMUL8’s approach.  Rather than write a detailed spec, build, run and deliver numerical results, SIMUL8 delivers a series of evolutions of simulation models that can run – with any parameter values.  So, if the team at Gatwick want to try 72 check-ins with 9 airlines, each with its own imported passenger profile- they can do that.

Plus, they can do it live in meetings to provide fast answers to questions and the back-up of “here is why” demonstrations of passenger flows.

The team at Gatwick says the way SIMUL8’s consultants work; interactively and in steps as small as they like is a huge contrast to their previous experience of external consultants. Typically they want to debate what is and is not included in a specification or decline to take on blocks of  smaller jobs. In addition, some external consultants aim for customers to be dependent on them for answers, which can delay work and often comes at a cost.

Although consulting is important to support customers, SIMUL8’s business model relates mostly to creating and selling easy to use simulation software. This means that the consulting team can concentrate on making sure that the benefits are available to the client rather than concentrating on how to maximize their billed hours.

At SIMUL8 we pride ourselves in offering our customers fast and flexible support. Have other examples of fast and flexible support you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.