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The six desks · Procurement

Katja, procurement lead*

“I need to score six vendors against forty numbered requirements without reading six brochures.”

What she needs to decide

How to score this line without taking our word for it

Katja is not deciding whether SkyRoster is the right product. She is deciding how to fill in a scoring sheet consistently, across six vendors, in a way she can defend if someone questions the result later. That means three things: a rubric she didn't have to invent herself, a clear line between what's proven and what's modelled, and a way to check forty requirements without reading forty pages of prose for each vendor.

A rubric that isn't ours

Score this against EUROCONTROL's checklist, not our pitch

The Network Manager Directorate published its own ten-point summary of what an automated rostering solution should do, inside a rostering best-practices guideline it wrote for exactly this kind of evaluation. It is not vendor language. Score any of the six vendors on your list against these ten lines and you have a rubric nobody in this market can accuse you of borrowing from us.

  1. Generates fully compliant rosters against labour regulation, fatigue rules, availability and competency.
  2. Optimises workforce utilisation: less overtime, less staff leakage, for the same demand.
  3. Runs an integrated fatigue risk approach, not a bolt-on spreadsheet check.
  4. Compares roster scenarios against competing goals, cost against fatigue, rather than one fixed answer.
  5. Cuts the time spent on manual planning, measurably.
  6. Re-adapts a published roster quickly when a disruption hits.
  7. Treats staff wellbeing and preference as an input, not an afterthought.
  8. Catches allocation conflicts before they reach a published roster, not after.
  9. Lets staff plan and request on the go, not only from a desk.
  10. Tracks working hours, absences and leave allowances automatically, feeding payroll.

Source: EUROCONTROL, Air Traffic Services Operations staff/personnel Rostering Best Practices and Tools Guidelines, NMD/SAF/2653, Edition 1.0, 26 April 2023. Full detail on how this guideline names SkyRoster as the source of its worked examples: what EUROCONTROL's guideline attributes to SkyRoster.

Evidence, sorted honestly

What's proven, what's modelled, and what we don't claim

Every figure on this site carries a label, and the label is the point: it tells you how much weight to put on the number before you copy it into your own sheet.

verified

Read directly from the running product, regenerated on every release. Treat it the way you'd treat a spec sheet.

configured

Real, but it's a setting an administrator turns on, not a fixed default. Worth a line item, but check it's switched on in the deployment you're scoring.

modelled

A simulation or illustrative scenario, not a measured customer outcome. Useful for understanding the mechanism, not for a hard number on your sheet.

What we do not have, and will not invent to fill a line: named ANSP reference customers, logos, testimonials or a reference-call commitment. The proof we do have is five case studies EUROCONTROL itself published, with unit sizes and method attached, plus the visible mechanism of the product. If your sheet has a line for named references, the honest entry for this vendor is that one doesn't exist yet.

Full detail: the five published case studies and the claims ledger behind every number on this site.

Two tools built for exactly this

A question list and a matcher, not a brochure

Vendor-neutral

Questions to ask any vendor

A fixed list of questions written to be put to all six vendors the same way, so the answers are comparable instead of each vendor answering the question it would prefer you'd asked.

Line by line

Requirements matcher

Run your own forty requirements against SkyRoster's actual feature set, with the same verified, configured or modelled label attached to each line, instead of a flat yes or no.

Both tools start from the evaluation hub, which is the page to send the rest of your selection committee to before anyone sits through a demo.

What it can't do for her

Three honest limits

  • It can give her a list price today, and an indicative offer for the sheet: every rate is on the pricing page and the offer builder applies them to her headcount, with the volume curve shown as its own line. What it cannot give her is the binding figure a tender needs. That is a written offer from JLG Consulting, after a working session has confirmed the user count and the deployment shape.
  • It cannot supply a named reference customer or a logo. That evidence genuinely does not exist yet for this product; the closest available proof is the published EUROCONTROL case studies above.
  • Standard SaaS includes a 99.5% uptime SLA, daily backups and automatic updates on Microsoft Azure in the EU. Deployment and service termsdistinguish that commitment from dedicated and customer-managed arrangements. Assurance evidence, recovery objectives and support response times are confirmed for the chosen contract in an evaluation conversation.

* Katja is a fictional persona, not a specific customer or contact. She stands in for the procurement lead role that owns the scoring sheet in a rostering tender.

Score us against your own forty lines, not ours.

Bring your actual requirements sheet to a working session and we will go through it line by line with an engineer in the room, marking each one verified, configured, modelled, or not yet true, on the spot.

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Who else will ask, and what they will want