About the Client
The client is a growing airline in Middle East region and one of the leading airlines of the world, operating services to the Middle East, Europe, Indian subcontinent, North America, Far East, Africa and Oceania. It employs more than 6000 staff and around 40 aircraft. The airline is on an aggressive growth path and the statistics from IATA indicate that the airline is ranked among the top-ten airlines in the world in terms of growth since inception.

Client Challenges

• Costs involved in managing staff travel: Employee leisure travel was seen as a cost center. Staff travel was on a completely manual mode and employees didn’t choose to travel much, because of the high lead times and cumbersome process involved in arranging a travel for themselves. The revenues from staff travel were negligible and the management was looking out for mechanisms to improve staff travel revenues.
• Aggressive growth plan of the airline: The IT division of the airline was entrusted the responsibility of automating internal systems in order to support the growth plans of the airline.
• Migration to self-service platform for HR services: The airline had a plan for migration of their HR system and staff travel automation was next in line.
• Improve productivity with seamless access and approval process: The airline was looking for complete automation of leisure and business (duty) travel processes so as to easily manage the staff travel request workflow and thus improve staff productivity. The airline also had a lot of specific requirements related to staff travel management.

The IBS Solution
IBS’ staff travel management solution iFly Staff, met the airline’s requirements perfectly. Integration with Oracle suite of applications and Amadeus GDS used by the airline was easy since iFly Staff had successfully integrated with those systems in earlier implementations at other airlines. Completely web-based, iFly Staff provides staff the ability to check entitlements and make their leisure travel bookings directly from home, reducing the long waiting time for travel requests at the Staff Travel Department. The system helps the airline control the business travel process – all business travel requests had to go through a multi-level approval cycle before an actual booking could be made. IBS’s domain expertise and experience of successful implementations of iFly Staff at other airlines made it easy for this airline in choosing the system. This was the fourth implementation of the iFly Staff system at any airline.

Business Benefits for the Client
iFly Staff solution created a user friendly environment to the airline staff . The time taken for the whole process from staff travel request, approval till booking, reduced from days to a few minutes. The solution helped airline staff to make travel bookings without spending time in going to staff travel office or waiting a long time for approvals. This encouraged them to use the facility frequently. Also, with the iFly Staff implementation, the awareness level about staff travel privileges increased, leading to much greater and effective utilization of the privileges.

The airline was able to direct the staff to lean routes by offering special promotion tickets to the staff through iFlyStaff solution. This feature furthered the staff to travel in lean flights which would otherwise fly empty. It increased the load factor of the lean flights which in turn improved the revenue to the airline. This made them to achieve 30% increase in staff travel flown revenue.

As a result of staff growth, special promotion tickets, user convenience and less dependability, the number of staff travel requests increased. With automation in place, the administrative overheads were lesser as compared to the previous manual mode of operation. iFly Staff enabled the airline to manage the staff travel requests with the existing resources which conserved their cost, effort and time. The savings from the staff travel added up the airline revenue transforming the staff travel department from a cost center to a revenue center.

The core benefits of the system were:

• iFly Staff has proved to be the perfect web-based staff travel management solution to complement the aggressive growth plan of the airline
• With the implementation of Oracle HRMS and iFly Staff, the HR and staff travel processes were streamlined and the service levels for these departments have drastically improved resulting in high levels of employee morale
• Automated all the processes associated with staff travel, reducing internal resources, eliminating human error and enforcing the staff travel rules & policy
• Reduced the ticket-booking time from hours to a few minutes
• Helped to reduce the administrative overheads by automating the duty travel and approval workflows
• Provides great flexibility and control with greater accountability
• Provides all the necessary reports to aid the management in the decision making process

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