Airport operators today have legislative and regulatory responsibilities which are applicable to all Australian domestic and international airports. This brings an arduous business burden to maintain electronic and paper documents for periods from 7 to 99 years.

 

Some airports are owned by a shareholder collective and therefore have legal and commercial obligations for records management.

Operators must maintain sensitive personal and privacy information relating to staff that work on airport property for government requirements.

 

These government organisations include Federal, State and Local Government departments, Statutory bodies related to aviation, environment, roads and property and Policing or Security agencies.

 

The paperwork is endless.

 

Client Focus - Gold Coast Airport : Airport facilities management

Gold Coast Airport is Australia's fastest growing airport and is the 7th busiest airport in the country. Gold Coast Airport Limited purchased Gold Coast Airport  from the Government in 1998. A legacy of this acquisition was a paper filing system which dated back many years. The airport’s management quickly came to realise that the expected expansion and growth of the port coupled with the inherited paper legacy would require careful supervision and control. This was accepted as both a corporate governance and day to day management issue. Gold Coast Airport began to investigate systems that would manage all of its corporate information including electronic documents. The solution to the problem needed to be flexible, innovative and customisable. Budgetary controls on the exercise also needed to be considered.

 

After the initial implementation, data entry phase and staff training to break old habits of storing business documents in Outlook or informal paper files the time savings have been significant in document retrieval. All corporate email is also automatically archived to mitigate any compliance and OHS issues.

Within 6 months the airport was enjoying around 20% operational cost savings and the overal efficiencies have allowed the airport to increase throughput to almost 4 million people per year ( an increase of almost 2 million passengers in 5 years).