Emirates Group staff have taken top honours at the Idea of the Year competition during the 2nd Annual Ideas Arabia conference in Dubai.
Flight Operations Engineer Manoj Panicker won first place in the Technology section, while Peter McCarthy, Rajamanickam Pandian and Vimal Patel from Flight Training Facilities won the Financial Trophy.
The staff members were already winners of the company’s suggestion scheme, Bright Ideas, a member of Dubai Quality Group’s Ideas Arabia, which recognises the most significant ideas implemented by its members throughout the year.
The leading regional idea competition drew over 70 suggestions from companies such as Dubal, Emirates Bank, Dubai Municipality, DEWA, The Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation and other top Dubai organisations.
Martin Tomlinson, Emirates’ Senior Vice President for Performance Development, said: “The success of the Emirates Group is heavily dependent on the quality of the staff and it is ideas like this that helps us to set our company apart from others.
“Bright Ideas encourages staff to be innovative and to add value to the company over and above their daily work. I am delighted that the efforts of Manoj and Peter’s team have been recognised.”
The technology award is given for ideas which make an improvement by a manufacturing, engineering or technical solution. Manoj developed an IT solution, known as the Ground Based Analysis Tool Auto Processor (GAP), software which has already saved the company around Dhs500,000 and improved productivity by around 20 man-hours a week.
Manoj developed the new software module in his own time over a four-month period. The ability of the new software module to run repetitive and time consuming tasks not only cuts down on man-hours but also reduces possible human errors during input.
The Financial Trophy is given for ideas that improve an organisation's financial efficiency. Peter and his team performed the Airbus A310 full-flight simulator EGPWS update needed to maintain fleet commonality, provide a relevant training environment and meet simulator qualification requirements inhouse, in addition to saving the company Dhs1.4 million in design and implementation costs
Emirates staff members were also finalists in four other categories.
The Bright Ideas suggestion scheme has previously produced winners in the Ideas UK competition in 1998 and 2003, as well as in the Ideas Arabia competition in 2006.
