Airport procurement often begins with a deceptively simple question:
What exactly are we buying?
For air traffic services and other safety-critical operational services, the understandable response is often to define the answer in considerable detail: organisational structures, staffing models, systems, processes, qualifications, reporting arrangements and individual service components.
Some of that detail is essential. Airports must be confident that regulatory, safety and operational requirements will be met.
The problem arises when the specification goes further and begins to prescribe not only the outcomes required, but also exactly how the supplier must achieve them.
A procurement process built primarily around inputs can preserve existing arrangements rather than test whether they remain the best way to meet the airport’s future needs. It can also restrict competition, limit innovation and leave both airport and supplier managing contractual detail rather than operational outcomes.
A stronger approach starts with the results the airport needs the service to deliver.
Start with strategic alignment
An air traffic service is not an end in itself. It is one of the operational capabilities through which an airport delivers its wider strategy.
The procurement should therefore begin by establishing how the future service is expected to support the airport’s strategic direction. That may include ambitions relating to growth, capacity, operational resilience, customer experience, environmental performance, technology, commercial efficiency or changes to the airport’s operating model.
This alignment is important because procurement decisions made without a clear strategic reference point can become dominated by the existing contract, current organisational arrangements or short-term operational concerns. The result may be a technically compliant service that does not fully support where the airport is trying to go.
The airport should first translate its corporate priorities into a small number of clear service objectives. For example:
- If the airport is planning significant traffic growth, what capacity, resilience and scalability must the service enable?
- If operational efficiency is a priority, which aircraft movement, delay, predictability or airfield outcomes matter most?
- If the airport is pursuing environmental commitments, what contribution should the service make to reduced taxi time, fuel burn or avoidable emissions?
- If technology and digitalisation form part of the airport strategy, how should the service support future integration, data sharing and new operating models?
- If commercial sustainability is important, what balance of cost, flexibility, risk and long-term value is required?
This creates a clear line of sight from airport strategy to service objectives, requirements, performance measures and contractual arrangements.
The sequence should be deliberate:
Airport strategy → service objectives → required outcomes → service requirements → performance measures
Without that alignment, specifications can become collections of inherited requirements. With it, each requirement can be tested against a straightforward question:
How does this help the airport achieve its strategic objectives?
This changes the starting point from:
What resources and structures must the supplier provide?
to:
What must the service enable the airport to achieve?
That distinction is important.
An input-led specification might define the number of positions, roles, systems or reports expected. An outcome-led specification defines the safety, resilience, capacity, efficiency, responsiveness and improvement that the airport needs from the service.
The first approach tends to reproduce the current solution. The second creates space to test whether a different solution could deliver greater strategic value.
Inputs still matter
Outcome-based procurement does not mean abandoning detail or asking suppliers to deliver against vague aspirations.
Air traffic services operate within a regulated and safety-critical environment. Certain inputs will remain mandatory, including:
- licensing and competency requirements;
- regulatory compliance;
- minimum safety and assurance arrangements;
- defined operational responsibilities;
- business continuity and resilience requirements;
- interfaces with airport systems and stakeholders;
- information security and data obligations.
The key is to distinguish between:
- Essential constraints and minimum requirements, which the airport must prescribe; and
- Delivery choices, which may be better left to the market to propose.
Where every aspect of the operating model is fixed in advance, suppliers may have little room to differentiate their approach. The procurement can then become a comparison of price against a largely predetermined solution rather than a genuine test of capability, innovation and value.
Avoid buying yesterday’s operating model
Airport service contracts can remain in place for many years. During that period, operational needs, technology, regulation, traffic patterns and stakeholder expectations may all change.
A specification that is too tightly built around existing inputs risks locking the airport into yesterday’s operating model.
This is particularly relevant where developments such as digitalisation, remote service delivery, automation, data sharing and new forms of operational collaboration may change how services can be provided.
The airport does not need to predict every technological development. It does, however, need to avoid writing a contract that prevents the service from evolving.
Outcome-focused requirements can create room for suppliers to propose different ways of achieving the airport’s objectives, while appropriate governance, assurance and change-control arrangements provide the necessary oversight.
Define measures that matter
An outcome-led contract depends on meaningful performance measures.
The objective should not be to create the longest possible list of KPIs. It should be to identify the relatively small number of measures that demonstrate whether the service is supporting the airport’s objectives.
These may cover areas such as:
- safety and regulatory performance;
- service resilience and continuity;
- operational efficiency;
- delay and predictability;
- runway and airfield performance;
- environmental outcomes;
- stakeholder satisfaction;
- responsiveness and improvement delivery.
The measures must also be capable of being governed in practice.
A KPI that cannot be reliably measured, clearly attributed or meaningfully influenced by the supplier will rarely improve performance. Equally, measures focused only on contractual compliance may confirm that activities have taken place without showing whether they produced the intended result.
Good performance arrangements connect three elements:
- the airport outcome being pursued;
- the supplier contribution to that outcome;
- the evidence used to assess progress.
They should also support constructive discussion rather than simply generate monthly reporting.
Consider the service architecture
Focusing on outcomes can also encourage airports to reconsider how the requirement is packaged.
Traditionally, an air traffic service may be procured as a single integrated package from one provider. That may remain the right answer. In other cases, the airport may benefit from considering whether certain service, technology or support elements could be separated or sourced differently.
This is not an argument for unbundling in every case.
Splitting a service can introduce additional interfaces, accountability risks and integration demands. The airport must have the capability and governance arrangements needed to manage them.
However, treating the existing organisational package as fixed can unnecessarily narrow the market. A more open assessment may reveal alternative models involving specialist suppliers, technology partners, separate service components or different allocations of responsibility.
The correct structure should follow from the outcomes, risks and capabilities of the airport, not simply from the organisation of the incumbent service.
Give suppliers a problem worth solving
Market engagement is most valuable when suppliers are invited to help the airport understand what is possible.
If the airport presents a finished solution and asks the market only to price it, suppliers have little incentive or opportunity to contribute new thinking.
A better process explains:
- the airport’s objectives;
- the operational context;
- the problems to be solved;
- the essential constraints;
- the outcomes that matter;
- the airport’s appetite for change.
Suppliers can then respond with proposed delivery models, technologies, transition approaches and commercial structures.
This does not mean handing control of the requirement to the market. The airport must retain ownership of its objectives, risks and evaluation criteria. It does mean using procurement to test the best way of meeting the need rather than merely validating an existing assumption.
Assess the airport’s own capability
An outcome-led approach places responsibilities on the airport as well as the supplier.
The airport must be able to:
- define its priorities clearly;
- evaluate different delivery models;
- understand operational and commercial trade-offs;
- manage interfaces;
- govern performance;
- interpret data;
- lead change.
Where those capabilities are weak, a highly flexible contract can create ambiguity rather than innovation.
Procurement readiness should therefore include an honest assessment of the airport’s own capability and capacity to specify, evaluate, mobilise and manage the future service.
The right procurement model is not simply the most innovative one. It is the model that the airport can govern successfully.
From compliance to value
Input-based specifications can create an illusion of control. They make it possible to check whether the supplier has provided the required people, processes, systems and reports.
But compliance with specified inputs does not necessarily demonstrate that the airport is receiving the outcomes or value it needs.
Outcome-led procurement asks a more demanding question:
Is the service helping the airport achieve its operational, commercial and strategic objectives?
That question should shape the specification, evaluation, contract, performance measures and governance arrangements.
It does not remove the need for precise requirements. It ensures that precision is applied where it matters most.
The strongest airport procurements define the destination clearly, establish the necessary safeguards and allow credible suppliers to demonstrate the best route to get there.