Using Lean Philosophy to Improve Passenger Departure Flow in Abu Dhabi Airport

Lean is an established process improvement philosophy to achieve the operational excellence and the benefits can be more than just improving the process. This is evident as the benefits of Lean are truly exploited in automotive, aerospace and manufacturing sectors. There are numerous implementations of Lean philosophy in service sector such as banking, higher education, software development etc. The main aim of this paper is provide an overview of Lean philosophy and explore the benefits for airport processes. The airport processes are completely different than the manufacturing and other service sectors due to the complex interlinking between different stake holders such as airline regulations, national/international law etc. This paper exemplifies the Lean philosophy by drawing examples form Passenger Departure Process (PDP) in Abu Dhabi International Airport (a major international airport). This paper starts with examining the background to the project and why airports have many characteristic features, which are fundamentally different to the manufacturing environment in which Lean was originally devised. Since its origins, Lean philosophy has been also applied to many service environments. Further, Lean philosophy is introduced and Lean principles and waste is discussed from the PDP perspective. Along this, a brief literature review is presented on the existing process improvement approaches used in the airports. The ultimate aim of the project which it has achieved was to develop a practical methodology of applying Lean principles to the PDP help airline managers and staff eliminates the waste of available resources and so increases the passenger flow through various stages of the process in line with Lean philosophy.