Live Smartpref overated?

[screamingpax]

Nevets. In answer to your earlier questions. Personally, I do not know if any bid runs prior to the final one would have been better for me. I don't know if there is a way to see them anyhow. Personally, I end up with what I want so I never bothered to try. As far as the window is concerned, realize its a large "zone" that your credit must fall into. Say they publish 80-105hrs. If I want to work minimum I actually set my threshold to like 60 therefore if the company were to drop the window minimum below 80, say to 75, as long as I have that number of hours, I am done. If you don't set a personal threshold, or you set it at the original window bottom of 80 and they lower the bottom, it will still try to finish to what you set. In this example, 80 hours even though they dropped to 75. If they drop it to 75 but I set my threshold at 100, it will try to keep adding to my schedule to meet my request. I have had it finish me as low as 57 hours and well up into the 105+ range. Depending on how you bid your trip, you can have a lot of control over this. Hope this makes sense and answers your questions.

 

[Clutch]

Here is a complaint from a LXJT pilot on the "crackpipe". Sounds like that live bidding is all it's cracked up to be.

"So I go thru all the online material, met with someone from the union that helped me set up a bid. Sit here for over an hour just viewing the changes. And still get sh*t. One minute before the bid closes, my bid looks good then it closes and reduces me to 12 days off and some crap trips. What the F, how can it look good one minute before it closes and then turns to crap. I seriously doubt everyone made changes one minute before it closed. Crew planning has given better schedules, and I wasn't bidding at the complete bottom. If your not bidding in the top five to ten, its f-ing pointless to put a bid in. What a waste of time

PBS for initial window never" ​

It may be time to sit back and let these guys exhaust themselves chasing their tails trying to get that lackluster sh*tbox of a bidding system to work correctly. The average pilot over there will eventually get fed up, tire out and begin to wonder why we are so pleased with our PBS system.

 

[WWEfan]

I'm surprised no one posted this little gem.

"Global constraints began at line 5."

What? So the top 4 relief line holders got what they wanted and the other 41 didn't. Hope you're in the top 10%! Globalization FTW!

 

[ingleburg5]

I'm surprised no one posted this little gem.

"Global constraints began at line 5."

What? So the top 4 relief line holders got what they wanted and the other 41 didn't. Hope you're in the top 10%! Globalization FTW!

If you understood the way our Phase 1 line bidding works then you would understand why this is the case. The trips that are left over for these guys to bid on are the junk that nobody else in Phase 1 wanted. This leaves several days in the month that have so many trips left open that the system has to make those guys work those days. Now let's take your point and look at the big picture. If there are enough trips for 45 relief lines there were probably around 270 Phase 1 lines. Those 270 lineholders had the chance to pick through all the left over open time and adjust their schedules accordingly. In addition as you pointed out there were 4 people that were not constrained in Phase 2. So 274 bidders out of 315 lines got to bid without being "constrained.". Not 90% as you claim in your post. The bottom 13% were constrained with 87% of bidders unconstrained, which is pretty much what the union has said all along.

 

[Nevets]

Nevets, even your scheduling guru admits that things change at the last minute now and that there are lots of things to iron out. Here in his own words on this issue that has popped up.

Quote from Steve on the Pipe regarding the OP issue:

And especially when people start calling 2 hours before the bid closes to learn how to put a bid in. I was literally on the phone trying to help people get their bid in just minutes before it closed. When top people do this is changes the results for everyone. But what was I going to do...tell them to go screw? We need to understand that setting up a bid in this system is the most important thing you can do. I'd say the majority of people we talked to over the last 2 days didn't even read the blastmail that went out over the weekend telling you how important it was to place trip preferences. We also asked to make sure you went into smartpref and chose a reserve line if you bid that way in adopt. The bids in adopt weren't posted until 11am. So at that point we had to go in and change almost a dozen peoples bid from either the default or what they had and put them on reserve so that junior bidders would receive a line. Often time people looked at their lines and said, yup...thats ok...but since those changes were going on the system was actually able to BETTER honor what you asked it for. However it just looked different. It may have moved things around and even added trips but more often than not it was a better award based on the bid. The weak link here is are the bids. We need to teach people better and we need to set up the bids earlier and just set it and forget it. If you set up a good bid there is no reason to keep changing it because it's already bidding the trips you want even if people senior to you already "own" them.

I'm not saying it's perfect....FAR from it! We got a lot of work to do and lots of questions that need to be answered. But at the end of the day I'd much rather be learning about this here and now instead of in a full pbs. (which would honestly work a heck of a lot better than phase II does). We also need to keep our expectations where they should be. This is only meant to replace crew planning. You may have gotten a better line some months with planners. But in 8 years as chairman I've never once gotten and email telling me how great planning built their relief line. I get about a dozen a month asking how the F they could be build a line as the number one guy working all weekends when their junior crashpad buddy is getting them all off. If we put that in perspective I think we're still doing better. There is still a lot of work left to do however.

Steve McKnight​

And here is a previous post by the scheduling member that you didn't post:

I will say that today we had a little bit more change than we would have like right at the end, and it's not so much last minute bidding related as it is test environment related:

Because we were still running this as a parallel test, we had to make SmartPref award what AdOpt showed in the bid packs. That's why we built exactly the same number of relief lines as AdOpt did. But we also had to make sure that the people who were awarded Relief Lines in AdOpt were also awarded them in SmartPref. Especially in CLE, we had a whole bunch of people who bid back to reserve, but never put that bid into SmartPref.

Unfortunately, we couldn't tell what people's AdOpt bid was until bidding closed and the AdOpt lines were awarded this morning. Normally it takes an hour or less to have the final awards ready, which would have allowed us to have those people "Opt Out" at least an hour before bidding closed. AdOpt took FOREVER this morning. I was sitting in crew planning and we literally got the award at 11:30. When all of a sudden some bidders are no longer participating, it's going to change the award a little bit. I can say that if we operate SmartPref as a parallel test again next month, we will be moving the closing time back to reduce the chance of this recurring.

All that being said, I would be happy to discuss further with you, and if you'd like specifically what happened on your bid. I have no problem doing it in public on here, or if you'd prefer to remain anonymous on here just send me an e-mail so that I know who I'm looking at. We aren't here to sell anything, we're here to help...if I can give you advice so that you get a better award next month, then I'll call that a win.
​

This has more to do with parallel bidding than anything else. The way they build relief lines now, the company guesses at how many lines will be required to cover the leftovers after the ILIW closes and then they publish the phase 2 bid pack with that many relief lines. With smartpref running in parallel, it was able to build 6 extra lines than what the company published in the bid pack. So they had to take the lines away from those bottom six people in smartpref and give them lines. That in turn changed some of the lines of those in the constrained group. If this was a real live bid, it would NOT have happened.

It may be time to sit back and let these guys exhaust themselves chasing their tails trying to get that lackluster sh*tbox of a bidding system to work correctly. The average pilot over there will eventually get fed up, tire out and begin to wonder why we are so pleased with our PBS system.

And I've been saying all along that if this turns out just the way you guys say its going to turn out, then you have NOTHING to worry about because we will be fed up with it. So relax already.

Nevets. In answer to your earlier questions. Personally, I do not know if any bid runs prior to the final one would have been better for me. I don't know if there is a way to see them anyhow. Personally, I end up with what I want so I never bothered to try. As far as the window is concerned, realize its a large "zone" that your credit must fall into. Say they publish 80-105hrs. If I want to work minimum I actually set my threshold to like 60 therefore if the company were to drop the window minimum below 80, say to 75, as long as I have that number of hours, I am done. If you don't set a personal threshold, or you set it at the original window bottom of 80 and they lower the bottom, it will still try to finish to what you set. In this example, 80 hours even though they dropped to 75. If they drop it to 75 but I set my threshold at 100, it will try to keep adding to my schedule to meet my request. I have had it finish me as low as 57 hours and well up into the 105+ range. Depending on how you bid your trip, you can have a lot of control over this. Hope this makes sense and answers your questions.

Yes, it does, thank you. My whole point of this was simply going to be that on either system, your line may change. On flight line, its done subjectively manually an unknown amount of times by changing the threshold, unstakcing, etc. With smartpref, it also may change but its done in an objective way in which you can see (other than the last run after the bid window closes). With smartpref, you will see your line change from something you liked to maybe something you don't like as much but still satisfies your bid. With prefbid, you don't know if it changed from something you liked to something you don't like as much but still satisfies your bid.

I'm surprised no one posted this little gem.

"Global constraints began at line 5."

What? So the top 4 relief line holders got what they wanted and the other 41 didn't. Hope you're in the top 10%! Globalization FTW!

Just to add to the other reply to you, the problem in phase 2 because of the month to month transition conflicts, is that you are always left over with a disproportionate amount of open trips in the first 6 days of the month. If smartpref was used for everyone, it would solve the transition problem to begin with and wouldn't constrain a disproportionate amount of pilots.

 

[Oakum_Boy]

"Global Constraints"

New way of saying "You're Hosed"

WE DON'T WANT ANY PBS THAT USES GLOBALIZATION STRATEGY.

Why is this so hard to understand. It's a terrible system and the ASA MEC knows it.

 

[79%N1]

Does anyone realize we aren't going to solve any of this on here arguing back and forth with each other!!

 

[ASAFOE120]

Does anyone realize we aren't going to solve any of this on here arguing back and forth with each other!!

Agreed.

But Nevets is here asking questions about our PBS so he can decide for himself which would work better for him. Maybe if both of our MEC's were as open minded we would have got this thing done a long time ago!

 

[dojetdriver]

"Global Constraints"

New way of saying "You're Hosed"

WE DON'T WANT ANY PBS THAT USES GLOBALIZATION STRATEGY.

Why is this so hard to understand. It's a terrible system and the ASA MEC knows it.

And it's been said previously, by L-ASA pilots that ACTUALLY know how the flightline system works, it ALSO uses globalization. It's just manually done.

 

[JoeMerchant]

And it's been said previously, by L-ASA pilots that ACTUALLY know how the flightline system works, it ALSO uses globalization. It's just manually done.

Not true. Preferences are honored on a seniority basis with an audit trail to prove that preferences are honored. Smartpref can't say that.

Tell you what dojetdriver.....The minute you guys start using Smartpref for phase 1 and you like it as much as we like flightline...I will say sorry and be the cheerleader to try out Smartpref as a replacement...Until you guys start using Smartpref for phase 1 bidding you simply can't compare it to flightline....Prove me wrong and start using it.....