Case Study: American Airlines achieves 99.5% faster schedule processing with Alteryx

AA Optimizes Schedule Processing Using an Iterative Batch Macro

American Airlines’ Line Maintenance Strategic Planning team faced a complex scheduling challenge: a CSV “turn” file that didn’t link flights into continuous aircraft “lines of flight,” making it nearly impossible to verify that aircraft had required maintenance time at one of 39 qualified stations across 288 destinations and 27 aircraft types. The prior process was highly manual—red-penning printed schedules—and could take over 30 man-hours to analyze a 30-day schedule.

Using Alteryx and a custom iterative batch macro, the team rebuilt lines of flight from the turn file, looped unmatched and matched records through the macro until complete, and pushed results into a Mosaic/Teradata pipeline for Tableau visualization. The automated workflow cut processing time by roughly 99.5%—from ~30 man-hours to about eight minutes end-to-end (four minutes of actual processing)—and enables analysis of up to two years of schedules instead of just 30 days.

American Airlines

Michael Byars

Schedule Analyst