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Collaborate inventively
At various points over the past 29 years, you will have entrusted your life to Peter Tomlinson. An air-traffic controller since 1981, Tomlinson rose through the ranks at Gatwick, moved to be a group supervisor the main London control centre, and from 2000 took charge of all aircraft movements at Heathrow. But it wasn't until three years ago that he realised he could predict the airport's detailed traffic movements two hours before they happened. That was after he met the men from Formula 1.
While attending a workshop on cross-industry collaboration at McLaren's clinically silent technology centre in Surrey, Tomlinson reflected on his own project to predict landing times by mapping datastreams from aircraft flight plans, take-off times and other feeds, such as weather.
McLaren's proprietary software, he learned, could instantly analyse driver and car data captured from 200 racetrack sources, simulate and visualise alternative scenarios, and let pit-stop crews make informed split-second decisions. "The penny dropped," he recalls in a spotless glass office during a visit McLaren's Norman Foster-designed HQ. "The pit stop for Formula 1 cars is just like the aircraft turnaround. Why couldn't we map the Formula 1 world onto the airport world?"
Since then, National Air Traffic Services (NATS) has been working with McLaren's engineers to map Heathrow's taxiways and runways much as they do a Formula 1 track -- and then turn all the data into clear visualizations, so air-traffic controllers can plan in real time for the near future. When rolled out, says Tomlinson, the project will give him a more efficient airport, with less taxiway waiting time, fewer luggage-collection delays, and much more predictable schedules for departing passengers or those collecting others.
"We can now see time slices up to 30 minutes ahead, an hour ahead, or two hours ahead," says Tomlinson, 47. "On the screen you see a map of the airport, colour-coded for the demand on each section of taxiway. By linking that pool of quality data and visualising it with McLaren's software, so controllers can take quick decisions, we've moved to a completely different place." He pauses, quietly excited. "We've created something unique."
For McLaren, it was just one more opportunity to collaborate with radically different clients for mutual advantage. Its pit-stop crews had already been called in to Great Ormond Street hospital a few years earlier to help streamline the handover between surgery and intensive care, leading to new hospital protocols now assumed to have saved children's lives. Since then, the company has adapted its multi-million-pound research for the military (using its composite materials to make blast seats for Humvees), for the Olympics effort (creating a more aerodynamic bobsleigh for the UK team) and for personal health (building a knee brace with lightweight carbon and micro-hydraulics to speed up patient recovery).
"It's about mutual benefits that don't conflict," explains Chris Crockford, 38, business development director at McLaren Electronic Systems, one of five spin-off McLaren businesses. "On the car we have 120 to 160 channels of data we're taking in real time, and over a 30-year heritage of motor racing we've understood how to convert that data into very succinct information."
That knowledge has potentially widespread cross-industry value.
McLaren Applied Technologies, a ten-person firm in the group, is applying its technology and design knowhow to help train British Olympic cyclists and build portable health monitors and sleep-apnoea detectors. "We're instrumenting athletes to measure their physiological performance, their position on the pitch, the impact of that tackle - and in real time we can simulate outcomes in that game and can provide realtime feedback on, say, substitution strategy," says Geoff McGrath, MAT's 44-year-old managing director. Only yesterday, he notes, Chris Boardman came to consult the team.
As NATS sees it, collaboration has been transformative. "It forced us to reaffirm or revisit our own thinking," says Tomlinson. "It's been brilliant. Quite a lot of the initial conversations were done without a contract or non-disclosure agreement - but had we gone through a formal legal route, it would have put barriers between us and it probably wouldn't have happened."
The collaboration has involved seven NATS staff, from software to legal specialists, and ten from McLaren -- experts on everything from electronic sensors to scenario planning. Software testing began in 2008, and now real-time airport data is being captured to test accuracy. So far, the teams say their simulations have achieved a "97 per cent confidence value in predictive capability".
Could it work for other businesses? "It needs a culture, supported by senior managers, where staff can talk to the other industries without NDAs," Crockford says. "A lot of your readers would fear being so open and shroud everything in secrecy. We didn't do that.
About the last thing we did was get a legal structure. Yes, it was a risk."
There were risks for NATS too. "Some of McLaren's thinking challenged us -- we had to question basic assumptions such as why we route aircraft in a particular way," says Tomlinson. "But we had our air-traffic guys involved early on, so they could see the benefits. You need that ground level of shared understanding."
McLaren, meanwhile, is expanding its healthcare collaborations.
Currently in clinical trials is a pocket-sized remote monitor for diseases such as diabetes and congestive heart failure, which would give patients vastly greater mobility and cut NHS costs. It's likely to carry the McLaren brand.
McLaren, after all, is a business built on smart data-crunching to predict what happens next in a fast-moving environment. And that value goes way beyond the racetrack.
"If you can really predict what's going to happen on the surface at Heathrow," Tomlinson says, "and you can predict the same for roads and trains, you can see a situation when you're sitting at home with your iPhone, you type in your flight number, and it tells you what time you need to leave the office. Why should you need to set off two hours in advance?"
More companies in our Work Smarter package:
Howies
Devi Shetty
UBS
HubSpot
Best Buy
Red Gate
Vestergaard Frandsen
Inditex
Behance
LiveOps
Atlassian
D'O
Victors & Spoils
Happy Computers
Mosaic
Cancer Research UK
Generation Press
The Public School
37signals
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
