Jeppesen, a Boeing Company, has agreed to a new four-year year service agreement with Avianca, the flagship airline of Colombia.

Jeppesen will provide Crew Pairing and Crew Rostering services to optimize crew planning operations for the airline’s 5,000-plus crew members based in Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, Costa Rica, Honduras, Ecuador and Guatemala.

Jeppesen Crew Pairing and Crew Rostering are optimization-driven tools that use sophisticated modeling and implementation features to reveal insights that lead to better decision-making and actions.

Jeppesen Crew Rostering helps airlines build high-quality rosters while reducing total costs and time to market, leading to increased profitability. The tool also considers seniority to build rosters, based on a preferential bidding system which increases crew quality of life and job satisfaction factors.

“The addition of these crew services from Jeppesen will help us to operate more efficiently, taking into account numerous real-time crew planning factors that can greatly effect daily airline operations,” said Erika Ratkovich, Planning and Control Production director, Avianca.

“The flexibility provided by both the pairing and rostering solutions will allow us to both publish schedules further in advance as well as make necessary adjustments with day-of operations, which increases efficiency.”

Through use of Jeppesen Crew Pairing, Avianca will be able to optimize a full monthly crew schedule, instead of a typical daily or weekly outlook. The optimization tool offers powerful decision support, enabling effective control of costs and other objectives, while its flexibility and modeling capabilities makes it easy for the airline to adapt to changes.

“The implementation of Jeppesen Crew Pairing and Rostering with Avianca is the outcome of carefully developed strategy and teamwork to help the airline better manage their crew operations through advanced optimization and data analytics,” said Peter Andersson, vice president, Jeppesen Crew Management. “This agreement opens the door for further optimization solutions in the future and we look forward to working with Avianca over the long-term horizon to fully meet their operational goals.”