About Menzies

Menzies Aviation is a global provider of passenger, ramp and cargo handling services. Menzies has grown rapidly since its conception in 1995. Through a combination of organic growth, acquisitions and the development of niche opportunities, Menzies has established itself as a major force in the international ground handling industry.

Operating at 144 stations in 30 countries and supported by a worldwide team of more than 20,500 people, Menzies serves over 500 airline customers handling over 1.0 million flights and 1.6 million tonnes of cargo per annum.

History & Background

Menzies Support Services, an operating unit of Menzies Aviation, have the important task of providing buses around Heathrow Airport to collect and drop-off Heathrow Airport staff from various car parks to their respective places of work within the airport. The buses also take the workforce to and from the Terminal 5 construction site.

They began to experience support and maintenance issues and identified areas of failing coverage of the radios around the perimeter of the airport. The impact of this was unreliable communications with drivers, causing delays or wasted journeys when instructions were not received and downtime for vehicles when equipment required repair. The effect of this was potentially the failure to meet service levels agreed with the airport operator.

Solution

Menzies Support Services decided it was time to review suppliers. They approached Affini who already provide trunk radio services to the other operating units within the group: World Cargo and Ground Services. By taking advantage of Affini’s community trunk network they instantly gained reliable coverage on and around the airport, especially near the Terminal 5 site.

Affini owns and maintains a number of Trunk Networks across the UK and offers a comprehensive support service renowned for ensuring continuity of operation for customers under agreed service level agreements.

For Menzies Support Services Affini equipped their fleet of 90 buses with vehicle radios sourced from Team Telecom sister company Simoco and provided Motorola professional series hand-portables for the managers at Operations Control. Ensuring no disruption to the bussing operation all radios were installed in 9 working days.

Results

Menzies Support Services is now benefiting from a service level that provides them with replacement equipment in the event of failure within a 2-hour timeframe from fault reporting and the reliability of radio coverage on the trunk network across the airport enabling Menzies to meet agreed service levels with the airport operator.

They benefit from Affini’s support engineers, who with considerable experience in the aviation industry maintain the current network infrastructure while looking ahead to provide new technologies and applications to enable more efficient operations for customers.

In future, Menzies will be able to take advantage of the efficiencies that come from using a common platform with standardised service and support at other airport locations across the UK where Affini operate trunk networks.

”We selected Affini as a result of extensive testing of their network facilities. There is a marked difference in the quality of service compared to what we had in the past. From an operational perspective it is imperative that we have good connectivity enabling a ?world class? quality service to our customers.

Ben CurtisMenzies Aviation Group