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IT beneath its wings

The Indian aviation industry is growing rapidly. To cope with this hyper growth, it is relying upon information technology to take care of tasks such as ticketing, check-in and boarding. By Faiz Askari

There are some components that together make for a good in-flight experience—IT is among them. Airlines have identified IT as a key facilitator for providing a good experience to their customers. Beyond enriching a passenger’s experience, aviation CIOs clearly understand the capabilities of diverse IT applications.

Emphasising the role of IT in the growing aviation business, Ajay Bhatkal, Chief Technology Architect, Air Deccan says, “IT applications play an important role in the airline industry. Right from buying your ticket to boarding, everything is computerised. In fact, in India, Air Deccan is a pioneer in e-ticketing. This paperless transaction helps reduce the number of employees required to reconcile accounts.”

Explaining the criticality of IT applications, Bhatkal adds, “Around 35 to 40 percent of the tickets are booked directly on the Internet. With greater awareness and usage of the Internet this figure will definitely rise in the future. We encourage passengers to not only book, but also reschedule, cancel and avail refunds via Internet. Customers can also book their tickets through GPRS via SMS. IT applications are also used in check-in and boarding. A little down the line we will introduce electronic check-in.”

R N Moorthy, General Manager, IT, Jet Airways concurs vis-a-vis the importance of IT in this sector. He says, “IT investments are decided on the following major criteria—increase in revenue, passenger facilitation and cost reduction.”

"IT is the backbone and the lifeline of aviation today. Without technology no company will be able to progress, forget about turn a profit" - Karun Budhiraja GM, Marketing & Corporate Communications, Amadeus Indian Subcontinent

Karun Budhiraja, GM, Marketing & Corporate Communications, Amadeus, Indian Subcontinent says, “IT is the backbone and the lifeline of aviation today. Without technology no company will be able to progress, forget about turn a profit. IT is getting into customer services, client retention and acquisition and is also sometimes the deciding factor for an M&A deal. Earlier the case was different, IT was only a provider of technology. Today, it has become the decider in mainstream aviation.”

Elaborating on the growing importance of IT in the aviation industry, Khem Aithani, Vice-president, ITC Infotech says, “The airline community has realised that IT is an integral part of their business. They are laying greater emphasis on automating business processes. One of the central challenges the industry is facing today is that of trust, another is security.”

Two steps behind

In today’s context all mission-critical applications in an airline are IT enabled. Aithani adds, “For instance, from an operations point of view there are issues of flight management, crew scheduling, weight & balance and movement control. From a business point of view, the airline booking engine, inventory control, revenue management, accounting, departure control and so on are all critical applications.”

Informing about mission-critical applications at Air Deccan, Bhatkal states, “Among the advanced IT applications running at Air Deccan is the ARMS (Airline Resource Management System), which is the software for tracking fleet movements and enabling us to manage resources effectively. Some others are CRS (Centralised Reservation System) and call centre applications that are an integral part of Air Deccan’s business. We consider them as mission-critical applications.”

He adds, “Our CRS is entirely on the Internet and we can’t afford to have it fail. We have redundant links and systems. The failover systems may not be as efficient as the primary but it ensures that the system continues running even when the primary goes down.”

The airline’s redundancy goes right down to the airport as it has a booking office there and wants to ensure that customers always have that choice of booking mode available.

Moorthy of Jet Airways explains, “Certain IT applications are the bread and butter of the aviation business, for example, reservations, ticketing and check-in systems. These systems are required to be in place when an airline commences operations.”

M is for mission-critical

Ground-to-air radio telecommunications, air-to-air communications service, airport check-in—all these are backed by IT, without which there is no way that even one aircraft can take off. These diverse applications make IT a must-have-to-survive tool in the aviation sector.

Commenting on the technologies that are driving the aviation business, Aithani of ITC Infotech says, “The aviation sector is focussing on Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), RFID and biometrics applications. Some developments can be seen at Finnair, United Airlines, Qantas and Lufthansa. These airlines, apart from many others, plan to replace legacy IT systems with Altea, a hosted service that is based on UNIX, and an Oracle database, and the service provider is Amadeus.”

Moorthy adds, “IT solutions are used for advanced optimisation of aircraft utilisation, manpower and revenue. Revenue and crew management as well as flight operations are all done with the aid of IT.”

Budhiraja of Amadeus informs, “It is critical in today’s airline business to have an up to date and modern IT infrastructure. This can only exist if they manage to retain their existing customer base and acquire more. For this, a comprehensive ERP and CRM model needs to be in place at an airline.”

Almost all the large airlines have implemented solutions such as ERP and CRM. “Now they are in the next phase of innovating upon their existing processes, both on the business and the IT front. Airlines are increasingly looking at cost-effective ways of implementing the same,” states Aithani of ITC Infotech.

Giving the status of Air Deccan’s IT infrastructure vis-a-vis ERP and CRM, Bhatkal says, “We currently have a CRM solution at our contact centre whereas on the ERP front we are still evaluating our options. ERP can reduce revenue leaks and help make effective use of our skilled staff besides enabling seamless availability of information and transaction impact. CRM can enhance the experience of customers with call centre applications—what we call customer delight.”

With regard to the value of solutions like ERP and CRM, Moorthy says, “ERP is mostly used in the areas of finance, HR, purchase, and MIS. SAP and Oracle apps are widely used by most leading airlines. However, as far as I understand the market, CRM is not widely used in the airline industry when compared to ERP.”

What an aviation CIO wants

CIOs are looking for collaboration beyond the walls of their organisations. Innovation in depth in the business model is critical. The emphasis is on integrating business and technology to unleash a company’s creative potential.

Moorthy says, “Airlines need to optimise their resources namely manpower, aircraft utilisation and revenue. IT applications can become an enabler in this endeavour.”

Bhatkal of Air Deccan says, “IT can be a differentiator in retaining customers. Speedy and easy booking, automated check-in, baggage identification systems, easy cancellation and refund, automated call centre applications, availability of information and transparency can make a difference. All these are in great demand from the IT infrastructure perspective at any airline.”

Role of IT at a value carrier

Bhatkal of Air Deccan says, “We make around 35 to 40 percent of our ticketing revenue from direct Web bookings and about five percent from SMS and GPRS. This enables us to manage with a slimmer workforce. Moreover Air Deccan has India’s largest e-commerce Web site, with per day transactions of Rs 60 million. On the technology front, we have good remote monitoring tools that help predict failures, make repairs, and control situations.”

Moorthy of Jet Airways says, “Using the Internet and mobile it is feasible to make travel cost-effective. Direct selling on the Internet helps airline cut costs on agency commissions. In all these ways we rate IT as an important component of our business.”

Budhiraja of Amadeus says, “Technology makes air travel cost-effective by providing seamless service to the end-consumer and simplifying travel. Some examples are e-tickets that Amadeus was responsible for ushering in India. By doing this we have minimised the cost drastically. We offer e-visas in some countries, our Amadeus sales platform for front-office users is the world’s first browser-based system and finally our bouquet of airline outsourcing products.”

Technology in flight

Elaborating upon the role of IT in making the in-flight experience more comfortable and efficient, Bhatkal says, “At Air Deccan, we focus on offering the lowest fares possible for a person to travel from point A to point B. It is these low fares, which have made us the runner-up in the industry. As a low-cost, no-frills airline, we do not focus upon on-board entertainment applications. That said, we have plans to automate our entire in-flight sales and food services, so that we can serve our customers better.”

Moorthy says: “Extended applications like video-on-demand, phone-on-demand and Internet access will become a differentiator in long haul flights.”

He adds, “We are deploying e-ticketing as this will cut costs, improve efficiency and boost customer satisfaction.”

Giving a hint of upcoming IT applications at Air Deccan, Bhatkal says, “Adopting an effective revenue management system will give us an edge in the current market.”

RFID in aviation

For an industry where safety is of paramount importance, it is vital that individual aircraft are properly maintained. With thousands of aircraft in service each made up of millions of individual parts, a large international manufacturer such as Airbus needs to have a large supply of readily available spares.

Peter Spruijt, Group Director, Transport, Travel & Logistics, LogicaCMG says, “Tracking spares is a huge ongoing administrative task. According to a recent research by AMR Research, airline mechanics can spend up to 70 percent of their time locating parts. With RFID efficiency levels of aircraft maintenance go up with real-time tracking, accurate forecasting of inventory requirements and a reduction in the cost of carrying inventory.”

An RFID tag is a chip with a radio transmitter that can be attached to almost any object. The advantage of RFID is that it does not require direct contact or line-of-sight scanning. This means that thousands of tags can be read simultaneously, significantly reducing the time needed to check individual items. These chip features two-way interaction with read-write capability. Where historically inventory and logistics have been managed by read-only systems such as bar codes, RFID enables writing data to a chip. Changes to a tag throughout its life-cycle can be tracked, resulting in faster workflow, reduced paperwork and the elimination of error-prone data entry with the rise of automatic tools and parts tracking.

Since the aviation industry is relatively new, there is a lack of domain expertise. That is one of the biggest challenges that this industry is facing specially with respect to the IT environment in aviation.

Bhatkal of Air Deccan highlighted another aspect: “The other challenge is training on applications, given our spread in the country and the number of users specifically at airports. Our endeavour has always been to process at high speeds to ensure that passengers aren’t kept waiting at check-in counters where we always have long queues on account of restricted space and facilities and also on account of the number of flights departing at the same time.”

IT, as we have seen, is an integral part of the aviation industry which is right now enjoying hyper-growth and seeing the entry of new players all of whom are fighting for a bigger piece of the larger pie.