AirFrance KLM - How to Outsource a Critical Project with Lean-Agile Procurement
With a challenging six-month time frame, Air France looked to a new innovative approach to procuring the right team for the job.
Air France KLM Cargo Operations needed to improve the efficiency and productivity of its door-to-door cargo. Time is essential in freight and any delay or break in the chain would lead to product waste and unhappy customers. It was critical that a new system was created to improve the efficiency.
A new booking system was required within six months, how were Air France going to assemble a team that worked cohesively and remotely, thought innovatively, understood the cargo industry, and produce the product within the challenging time frame.
With a challenging six-month time frame, Air France looked to a new innovative approach to procuring the right team for the job.
Air France KLM Cargo Operations needed to improve the efficiency and productivity of its door-to-door cargo. Time is essential in freight and any delay or break in the chain would lead to product waste and unhappy customers. It was critical that a new system was created to improve the efficiency.
A new booking system was required within six months, how were Air France going to assemble a team that worked cohesively and remotely, thought innovatively, understood the cargo industry, and produce the product within the challenging time frame.
Key Points
Challenges:
Critical project with potentially high business outcomes
Short time frame
Keeping a high level of cooperation with an outsourced team in a remote location
Remodel the vendor sourcing policy
Results:
Six weeks to select a vendor and actually start the project
Accelerated project start: team building already done and new team already well aware of the business context and challenges
Challenging milestones easily reached
A key player in the air cargo industry, AIR FRANCE KLM MARTINAIR Cargo is the specialised air cargo business of the Air France KLM Group, offering a worldwide network of 457 destinations from two hubs, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
The recording
To hear Frédérique’s talk jump right to 31:17 in the video.
The slide deck
End of 2018, Frédéric was facing two major problems:
Deliver a new critical IT application for Cargo Truck management within a tight schedule. High importance – vital the Cargo Truck management system was efficient to reduce waste and increase output.
Recruit a new team to develop the new system. The existing team consists of many contractors from different vendors. It is not big enough to handle the project and there is a need for new skills.
The Team - Air France KLM Cargo Operations Department
Frédéric Jacques, Head of Cargo Operations IT
Simon Spoor, Frédéric’s Business counterpart (acting as Product Owner)
Eric Chaumette, Head of Managed Delivery Centers initiative
Sophie Durand and Lionel Massiera, Agile Coaches and LAP specialists
According to the new Air France procurement policy on hiring contractors, Frédéric would have to source a whole team, remotely located on the vendor’s premises.
Air France Cargo department has been working in an agile way for years (SAFe): how would a brand new remotely located team fit in? How would they quickly reach the necessary level of cooperation?
Time was of the essence and following the current procurement policy would have taken several months. Frédéric’s business counterpart, Simon was really concerned with this issue and couldn’t believe that sourcing a new team would fit in the challenging project schedule, given that traditional RFP (request for proposal) processes usually lasted several months a new way of thinking was needed.
Congratulations & Thank you!
Congratulations to the whole AirFrance KLM Team and our LAP Trainer Sophie Durand & Lionel Massiera. Furthermore we also wanna give a big thank you to Emily Ruffle from the Agile Business Consortium how made the interviews, crafted this success story and co-published it to spread the word.
In a fast changing world is the team the main asset!
Côte d’Azure in France, April 25+26 2019 - Together with guests from Air France KLM and David Kershaw from the UK Cabinet office we spent 2 days on our first LAP Retreat 2019, exchanging, challenging, developing Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) and most important had some fun & beers!-This blog post is a short summary about and why our concussing was valid for us as well: „In a fast changing world the team is the main asset!“
Côte d’Azure in France, April 25+26 2019 - Together with guests from Air France KLM and David Kershaw from the UK Cabinet office we spent 2 days on our first LAP Retreat 2019, exchanging, challenging, developing Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) and most important had some fun & beers!-This blog post is a short summary about and why our concussing was valid for us as well: „In a fast changing world the team is the main asset!“
Who were „we“?-The main attendees were the members of the LAP Alliance, the Certified LAP Trainers. To get an outside view we invited members of the recent success story with LAP at Air France KLM as well with David a representative from the public procurement/GOV. We’ve got hosted by 2 of our members Sophie and Lionel from Good!. A big thank you again for that!
We had great exchanges, we’re able to align towards a joint strategy and even developed new things, just awesome!-I for my side enjoyed it a lot.
A brief summary of our achievements:
Great exchanges with our guests from Air France KLM and with David Kershawfrom the UK Cabinet Office (involved in the Brexit)
Intensive exchanges, challenging our approaches, even the strategy of LAP, so that we became all better as a team
Gathering quotes and exchanging about further success stories
Understanding public procurement, it’s challenges and drafting how LAP could be applied
Develop new things like e.g. 1st drafts of visualizations about LAP in general and the Big Room Evaluation Day (so called POCATHON)
Sharing LAP to a bigger audience in France via the first LAP Conference together with Air France KLM
We’d like to share with you the following out of this exciting 2 days.
1st LAP Conference
In the evening of the 1st day Sophie and Lionel organized our very first LAP Conference for and with their customers/community. It was setup as private event and almost 40 people showed up, mostly with a procurement background. The event was kicked of by Damien, also Certified LAP Trainer and the found of goood!.
His talk about „Building a Sustainable Business“ showed very good, why we should include our partners and need to start treating them as such. Furthermore it’s no more a choice of being „just“ profitable but also responsible. And that in a fast changing world the team becomes an intangible asset!-We couldn’t agree more on that!
To achieve that he closed with the statement „We need to BREAK with all the RULES, but not the LAW“. In other words if we find and enable the mavericks in our businesses only we will overcome the current traps.
Air France KLM Success Story
After Damiens talk Frederic and Eric representing their Air France KLM team shared their success story with LAP in an interview style. AF KLM is already operating mostly agile, but the sourcing was done in a classic approach still and they saw very fast the benefits of LAP and were confident to rock it with the help of Sophie and Lionel.
Frederic started the interview, that it was quit a difficult project for him. He was new to AF KLM Cargo and they didn’t knew the partners either. The organization at AF KLM is furthermore highly distributed (Nizza, Amsterdam, Paris, …). At this moment they had less trust, that the vendors will provide the right people and a new approach to source a partner for their new Tracking Solution was very welcome.
It’s important to mention, that LAP wasn’t applied full stack. The pre-selection of the shortlisted vendors and the final contract negotiations have been done in a classic approach. However, to choose the right partner they all met in Amsterdam for 2 days in the center of AF KLM Cargo. The potential parters should show up with the people that will do the job and the ones with the commercial background too.
“Instead of eliminating the less promising offers, we ended up improving each proposal and choosing the best one!”
They have recognized from first hands how the vendor is organized, how they run the proof-of-concept (POC) and how decisions have been taken. E.g. one vendor showed up with 7 commercial people and decision taking was very painful with them. As on the other hand another vendor could take decisions right away. During the POC they run 1/2 day iterations and demoed at the end of each iterations their results to the real users at CARGO. At the end of the 2 days they decided and continued working with the partner the week after!-Ericmentioned something very interesting: Instead of eliminating the less promising offers, we ended up improving each proposal together with the potential partner and then we've chosen the best of it!
“The team building with the partner has been done mostly within the 2 days!”
„It seemed that the team building has been done within the 2 days right away!“, they said.-Interesting to hear was, that the initial ranking from the RfP had changed seeing the partners and their people in action.
Frederic and his team are very satisfied with the results of LAP and will apply it to future complex sourcing cases with AF KLM. One more time we’d like to thank Frederic and his team for sharing their case with us and the LAP community.
SwissCasinos Success Story - How we sourced an ERP in just 2 days!
Before the QnA session I had the pleasure to introduce LAP based on our latest full stack success story with SwissCasinos Group, that has sourced an ERP in just 2 days!-Full stack in a sense of setting up an agile, cross-functional product team with people that will do the job from the start. So became e.g. Daniel Pellegrini, Head of Finance & Board Member at SC Group, the Product Owner of this initiative. He and his team will be in charge not just for the sourcing, but the whole product life cycle. This is in his interest, as he knows exactly where he wants to develop that topic at SC Group.
In other words we started as early as possible with the right people. In addition to the AF KLM case we also co-created and signed the agile contract by the end of the 2nd day of the partner workshop. Therefor we needed beside procurement, decision takers, legal, etc. just everybody needed from both parties at the table.
Did you recognize how many we’ve mentioned „the right people“ and „team“?-Yes a lot!-Coming back to our initial hypothesis „In a fast changing world is the team the main asset!“ I personally can confirm, this!-I’ve felt it during the LAP Retreat, while hearing the story of AF KLM and I've got remembered by every success story we’ve done so far!
I can just recommend everybody out there: „give it more of a weight, the social facts are as important as the hard facts! “
We had a lot of fun too and this comes with true social fit for free :-)
Cheers
Mirko
Co-founder of flowdays, Creator Lean-Agile Procurement