ATLANTA—Managing security and investigations at the world’s largest airline presents more than a few challenges. One is managing the high number of incidents that can happen on a daily basis, which include credit card fraud, policy violations, bomb scares and passenger altercations. Then, all of these events must be recorded and accounted for to be able to effectively investigate, suggest solutions and ensure compliance.

Delta Airlines recently rolled out an incident management solution that assists the corporate security team — composed of several different teams including investigations, Operations Control Center Security Desk, compliance, and passenger misconduct and workplace violence — with tracking, analyzing and reporting incident activity across its divisions. The team uses PPM 2000’s Perspective to track 230 incidents per month, equating to nearly 3,000 events annually. Delta is also using add-ons to the core system to be able to analyze and link events and develop trending.

Delta evaluated two solutions, said Kim Hodgkin, manager, security administration and campus security for Delta, before choosing PPM 2000’s solution. Both solutions were presented to demonstrate its viability to a number of internal groups to “see how it would work for them. Trying to track compliance issues, for example, is completely different from investigations and interviews.”

During mid-implementation, Delta’s in-flight service group and the customer care team became interested in leveraging the system as well. But Hodgkin said the company decided the initial deployment had to focus on security and investigative purposes.

Prior to implementing the solution, the company’s reporting process was “all manual,” Hodgkin said, that included logbooks, Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. “We could only pull up one case at a time,” he said, meaning corporate security did not have the ability to share information across multiple divisions to accurate analyze data. “Today, we can take a flight attendant’s interview and a pilot’s interview about an incident and put them into [the system] to look at potential trends.”

For example, Delta’s corporate security department can look where the majority of passenger misconduct issues are coming from. “If we have a flight and there are a lot of incidents involving an overconsumption of alcohol, do we have a larger issue that needs to be addressed between two cities?” he asked. The company can also take a look at whether incidents are happening more on domestic or international flights.

Delta has customized the solution to use the vehicle information section for flight information. For example, rather than tracking vehicle license plate numbers, VINs and drivers, Delta customized field labels to include flight numbers, and departure cities and arrival cities, Hodgkin said. If a flight is diverted, the details of the diversion are tracked as well as other pertinent information such as what city the flight was diverted to and the costs associated with the diversion.

For more on this story, see the July issue of Security Director News.