Aviation
Enabling Cost-Efficient Crew Planning in the Airline Industry
Success Story
Our client is one of the largest airlines, which, along with its subsidiaries, is Europe’s largest carrier in terms of passenger volume and fleet size. Their crew member allocation and deployment system effectively manages more than 28 000 crew members and 700+ aircraft. We helped them on their digital transformation path to replace the obsolete 40-years old legacy system. With the expanding scope of integration requirements for the new platform that was about to replace the old one, Scalefocus was chosen as an integration partner.
We successfully implemented TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks based integration layer. The solution can integrate over 100 inbound/outbound interfaces aiding in crew accommodation management, scheduling, booking, crew duty check-in, etc., by facilitating seamless data flow to the existing crew management applications.
Reduced crew management costs
50% faster
integration testing
Enhanced route management
The Client
Our client is the largest German airline. When combined with its subsidiaries – it is the largest airline in Europe in terms of fleet size and the second-largest airline in terms of passengers carried. The airline group has over 700 aircraft, making it one of the largest airline fleets in the world. The group is a global aviation enterprise with more than 530 subsidiaries and equity investments.
The Challenge
As part of a major initiative to replace its legacy crew planning system, our client decided to prepare its environment for a successful upgrade journey and implement a TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks based integration layer using TIBCO EMS. The organization wanted to orchestrate services, capture events from internal or external applications and technologies to boost cost-efficient crew planning, and integrate it with their existing IT landscape.
Crew members allocation and deployment used to take place in a complex environment that had evolved over three decades, with components ranging from new to over 40 years old. Our client has around 28,000 crew members and nearly 2000 flights daily.
Maintaining operations on this legacy mainframe system was becoming onerous and was posing an unacceptable amount of risk to the company.
Costs on the rise – the existing system required routine maintenance and frequent, costly upgrades, which brought up unbearable IT expenses.
Flawed processes disrupting business operations – at the heart of the crew planning platform was a system developed in the ’80s. It was becoming increasingly difficult to ensure its support and further development. The system was cumbersome, and as a result, processes were flawed, leading to increased operational risks.
Challenging adoption of new business processes and best practices – the adoption of new systems and business processes required a large amount of effort to maintain backward compatibility with legacy protocols.
Inability to scale up – for our client, overhauling the entire infrastructure was critical to ensure company scalability and growth. The obsolete technological standards of the legacy system were turning into business growth blockers, and the need for a more advanced IT landscape became apparent as the demand for more efficient planning was constantly increasing.
The Solution
Scalefocus provided services across the entire project lifecycle. We assisted in the architecture and design phase, operational support and performed thorough code reviews. Our consultants were part of the client’s technical operation team that administered and monitored the new solution and built the testing, performance, and production environments. Scalefocus consulted the technical team on creating the different environments and meeting the 2-hour failover disaster recovery requirements.
We reengineered the integration requirements to provide our client with an out-of-the-box solution. In the scope of our services were deployment and optimization of the configurations to achieve high security, availability, and performance levels. We identified various test case scenarios and guided the operational team in the integration and performance testing phase, with code and documentation reviews to align the solution with the latest best practices.
TIBCO Hawk empowered monitoring and management of all distributed computing applications in the integration layer. The Oracle 12 rack ensured proper workflows for all interfaces between various modules. It also enabled enhanced user management, high availability, and an extreme level of data security.
We increased the development efficiency as well with a high level of compliance to our client requirements to data maintenance, functionality, and features.
Our teams performed integration and performance testing as many defects were identified beforehand. Our efforts led to:
- 50% faster integration testing
- 20% of defects have been found out of scope
- 20% of all performance test cases have been added by Scalefocus
The new cutting-edge platform took over the underlying integration of crew management operations and is now at the heart of all flights and crews. Our experts integrated external and 3rd party systems to the platform and integrated around 100 inbound/outbound interfaces. The enhanced route management facilitated crew rostering, scheduling, check-in, hotel, and transport management by seamless data flow to the existing crew management applications.
The Benefits
Our integration services equipped the client with a superior technical architecture that allows for easier future integrations with external systems. Our consulting efforts led to the optimized building of the integration environment and support of the application and facilitated the quality assurance team and the 3rd party application providers.
Scalefocus was involved beyond the initial requirements and proactively consulted our client throughout the whole migration and integration journey. We performed in-depth code inspections, and as a result, the airline received а much more stable and better-performing installation, accompanied by detailed operational documentation.
Business benefits
- Reduced crew management costs due to enhanced route management and optimized schedule
- Increased employee satisfaction
- 50% faster integration testing
- 20% of defects have been found out of scope
- 20% of all performance test cases have been added by Scalefocus
Client Success Stories
We have a global client base that includes Fortune 500 companies, innovative startups and industry leaders in Information Technology, E-Commerce, Insurance, Healthcare, Finance and Energy & Utilities.
