Linda MaisanoDirector of Rail Operations, Planning & Transformation - EurotunnelAs a manager, it was uncomfortable for me not to be able to offer my team an alternative during budget preparation, when they often found themselves working under pressure on workforce sizing. Thanks to EURODECISION’s work and the future tool, we are more confident in conducting our studies, more responsive in analyzing different scenarios, and less challenged by data quality issues.
Tanya CollinsPlanning Manager, EurotunnelAt the beginning of the project, we were not convinced that people outside our problem could support us. But seeing that EURODECISION experts understood our subject and that the results obtained with the tool matched ours, we were reassured. They are attentive, very educational, and always responsive. We have developed a respectful, warm, and friendly client/supplier relationship. In summary, we started skeptically, but we are now won over!
As operator of the Channel Tunnel, Eurotunnel transports nearly 10 million passengers annually between France and Great Britain via its passenger and freight rail shuttle service.
To accurately size the operational staff needed for the smooth running of operations, Eurotunnel’s Rail Operations Department works each summer on human resources planning for the following year’s budget period. The objective is to ensure that, taking into account changes in activity, all positions to be covered at terminals in France and Great Britain will be properly assigned to staff with the required skills, while avoiding overstaffing.
This budget staffing is a particularly complex task for Eurotunnel’s planning experts. It is necessary to take into account the high variability of traffic throughout the year, whether for freight (between 1,000 and 4,800 trucks transported per day) or passenger transport (between 1,000 and 8,500 vehicles transported per day in each direction), regulatory constraints varying from one country to another, the different types of employee contracts (permanent or temporary contract, rotating agent or front-line staff…), and the skills required for the many positions to be covered (approximately 200,000 positions to be covered with 1,200 permanent staff, who can have up to ten different skills).
Despite the team’s expertise and confidence in their planning method, this manual work in Excel files was very time-consuming and had the major disadvantage of not allowing verification of its accuracy. The Rail Operations Department, therefore, sought a more robust planning solution that would be understandable when presenting results.
After unsuccessfully attempting to model the problem internally, Eurotunnel turned to EURODECISION, a decision mathematics specialist that had previously worked on optimizing Eurotunnel’s nominal schedules a few years earlier.
Thus, in November 2023, once Eurotunnel’s planners had finalized the 2024 budget study by applying their usual method, they asked EURODECISION experts to model all the planning constraints and simulate, using the LP-AnnualPlanner solution, the same three sizing scenarios corresponding to activity forecasts (base case, favorable scenario, and unfavorable scenario). The results of these two studies were very similar, which reassured Eurotunnel of the feasibility of an automated solution to their budget staffing problem. The following year, they entrusted the 2025 study directly to EURODECISION, this time without conducting it themselves, and took more time to analyze the results in detail.
The success of these two studies convinced Eurotunnel that they could trust the solutions provided by an optimization tool, and they wanted to equip themselves with their own custom software for their future studies, a project they entrusted to EURODECISION. Initial workshops were organized to gather the requirements of Eurotunnel users from both countries and write the specifications for the future web tool. Successive iterations helped to properly frame everyone’s expectations and refine the specifications before launching development. The tool deployment is planned for before summer 2025 so that Eurotunnel planners can use it independently to prepare the 2026 budget period.
Once implemented, Eurotunnel teams are already imagining using the tool to conduct, during the year, additional studies and more in-depth analyses that they had difficulty carrying out due to a lack of time, for example, re-running a scenario to study the impact of an unforeseen event (traffic increase of x%). This tool could also be made available to other departments in the company that face complex planning issues.
