Air travel has been making the headlines lately. Flight delays, cancellations, and missing luggage leave passengers disgruntled, causing the aviation industry to struggle to make amends. Here is what Talma—one of the largest airport services companies in Latin America—did to improve their baggage handling.

It is a nightmare scenario: Imagine you finally made it to the airport, worked your way through the extended boarding process, and arrived at your destination only to find that your luggage is missing. London’s Heathrow Airport recently had to ask airlines to cancel 10 percent of their flights to resolve a mishap that left hundreds of passengers waiting for hours to reclaim their baggage.

The baggage handling comes with a large proportion of manual work, but human labor is scarce. Moreover, the use of automation is very often not feasible because of the bulkiness and the varying formats of passenger luggage. Yet, both of these issues will not dissipate quickly. Thus, airport service companies will need to find ways to relieve their existing personnel while bringing about more process efficiency – with or without the pandemic-induced obstacles.

ProGlove’s wearable barcode scanners realize a 50 percent efficiency gain

Barcodes are instrumental in processing the baggage handling. But as the environment is extremely fast paced and scan intensive conventional scanner guns represent a major slow-down for operators. Therefore, Talma, one of the largest airport services companies in Latin America, turned to ProGlove’s wearable barcode scanners. These lightweight devices are worn on the back of the hand and can be initiated by a simple press of the thumb. Hence, the workers loading or unloading always have their hands free – which is not only a big relief but let them get the job don

e much faster.

What they found impressed their Head of Projects & BI, Paula Cardona. She says “we found significant improvements in our initial testing and after rolling out the solution realized a 50 percent gain in efficiency in baggage handling processes. We could not have been more thrilled by the result.”

Shuffle staff around to other critical operations

In fact, the efficiency improvement was so great that Talma was able to strategically relocate operators from one workstation to another. This transformed what was previously a two-man job into just a one-man job. The operator was so efficient at scanning, pulling, and loading baggage with the ProGlove scanners that Talma could now shuffle staff around to other critical areas of the operation.

Curious to find out more? Download the Talma customer story or request a demo!