NAXOS

The Bid Awarding Module automates the process of awarding crew bids for airlines. It processes all submitted bids and applies criteria such as seniority, regulatory compliance, crew preferences, union rules, and internal airline business rules to determine bid awards. Airlines can view bids by status, including new, open, pending, and published, and have the ability to reassign lines as needed.

The Module maintains a repository of historical bid information for querying and reporting and includes a dashboard with a calendar view of awarded bids and bid statistics by bid type, status, location, and other criteria. The Bid Awarding Module is fully integrated with all other NAXOS modules, including the Crew Bidding Module, to retrieve submitted bids and enable seamless interconnectivity and data transfer.

Placing a bid is a fairly straightforward process. What makes the bidding process complicated is ensuring fair and accurate bid awards. Most airlines hire a designated crew scheduler or crew planning analyst to review the bids and determine who to award those bids to. The scheduler has to consider seniority, crew preference, regulatory compliance, and union rules. The crew scheduler also has to consider and prepare a schedule that meets the airline's internal business rules, such as hard constraints where pilots must be assigned to specific planes. This process also affects flight scheduling for airlines as they can only finalize flight schedules after the scheduler reviews and awards bids for each line.

Managing the bid awarding process manually or inefficiently through unintuitive systems can burden airline personnel with laborious and time-consuming work and ultimately cost the airport. Procuring an effective software to manage bid awards can provide an airline with substantial cost savings through a streamlined process, as well as improve accuracy by eliminating human error.

Flight operations software have significantly evolved over the years to the point where bid awards and crew schedules can be automatically generated by the software. Flight operations can support rule-based scheduling for cost effective pairing while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements, union rules, pre-defined crew activities and any internal business rules. Flight operations software can also collect crew bids to incorporate crew preferences and priorities for their schedule. Flight operations software streamlines crew pairing and rostering, eliminates award errors and overtime assignments, and ensures full trip coverage.