About the Client
The client is one of the world’s largest charter airlines with more than 40 years of industry experience. The client is a subsidiary of a world-class, innovative and customer-focused company that owns many best known European holiday brands and is a visionary leader in the airline, tour and travel agency businesses.

Client Challenge
The client’s existing system was expensive, less user-friendly and lacked a strong technology platform to support their long-term business strategy. The client’s system ran on obsolete technology and the architecture was not scalable enough to meet their growing business needs. The requirement was to introduce a new generation solution that could handle the seating, messaging and catering requirements of flights with ease. The chosen solution should solve the client’s Special Service Request (SSR) booking related problems and also bring about significant improvements in their business operations and performance.

IBS Solution
A team of domain experts from IBS worked closely with the business users to understand their business challenges and also to uncover their unique requirements. We proposed an end-to-end solution that was part of the aiREV framework to manage the Special Services as well as the Seating Services offered by the client to its customers. The existing system was replaced by a new generation passenger service request processing system built on advanced technology, thus ensuring scalability to meet the client’s growing business.

The new system interfaces with several external systems like the airline reservation system, scheduling system and also with the systems employed by the tour operators. The system accepts and processes bookings from the reservation system and tour operators, flight information from the scheduling system and aircraft registration details from the IDPS system. It allows advanced seating of passengers based on service requests and seating requests.

While a full-fledged administration module enables all essential airline business configurations, the generic external messaging framework has provisions for communicating with SITA lines. The system offers interfaces with stations for sending and receiving passenger name list with latest updates messages that can be sent through fax server and SMTP server. In addition the SSR system has provisions to archive data and generate reports which help to monitor all critical actions performed by the system.

Technologies
The architecture of the system is based on the J2EE framework with the core business logic residing in a J2EE server in the form of Enterprise Java Beans while Oracle was used as the RDBMS. The users interacted with the application through Swing clients and through hand-held terminals.

Business Benefits

• The system enabled the client to manage seating/catering and messaging of flights using a single system and hence significantly reduced costs and improved operational efficiency
• The system reduces the lead time required to deploy technology solutions
• IBS’ ability to deliver a solution of the highest quality within the agreed cost and schedule assisted the client in achieving their goals of efficiency, profitability and service quality