Client Overview

The customer airline serves an international network of business and leisure destinations throughout North America, Europe, Oceania and Asia, including every region of mainland China. Its hub in Taiwan gives passengers the conveniences of the shortest average geographic distance to all major cities in the Asia-Pacific region.

The airline, since its inception, has expanded its operations into air cargo, airline catering, ground handling, and aviation engineering services. Creative and innovative, the airline introduced one of the world's first premium economy cabins in 1992. Named Elite Class, it is a welcome choice for business and leisure travellers. They also make flying fun with innovative ideas, recognized in the United Kingdom by Wallpaper Magazine for Best Livery and in North America by Travel Weekly with a Magellan Award for Advertising/Marketing.

The Context

The customer initiated the process of joining the Star Alliance network some time earlier as part of its long term business strategy. However, the airlines had to put in place a system to meet the demanding Star Alliance requirements.

As part of the business operation plan to participate in the Star Alliance on schedule, the objective of IBS iFly Loyalty system implementation for our customer were:

• To allow members to earn and burn their miles between airline and other Star Alliance loyalty programs
• To synchronize member profiles and manifest with iFly Loyalty
• To exchange member, accrual and billing related files between host airline and other Star Alliance airlines
• To implement proper mechanisms to ensure billing between the airline and other Star Alliance airlines
• To allow Star Upgrade Awards (SAUA) & Redemption

It was expected that by the end of this implementation project, the customer would continue to use its existing Loyalty system as the point "earn-burn" engine and manage its members. iFly Loyalty system will interface with this loyalty system and other Star Alliance partner systems for the purpose of making them Star compliant.

Customer Challenges

The customer had still been using a legacy system which has limited/no support to Star Alliance requirements. In order to scale up to these requirements, the existing infrastructure and supporting systems were facing the hurdle of undergoing required changes in the stipulated time of 12 months, before which the airline had to prove its compliance to the Star Alliance requirements. They were not in a position to initiate a complete overhaul of their existing loyalty platform, as it may have ended up with them not being able to join the alliance on time.

Therefore, it was decided that a middleware that could act as an interface between the existing loyalty system and the Alliance system can be implemented to counter the deadline challenge. The main problem, however, remained - a challenging project schedule to avoid delaying the entry process into Star Alliance.

The Solution

IBS proposed its partner integration hub through iFly Loyalty to tackle all the challenges that the airline had been dealing with. IBS' proven delivery standards and extensive experience in the travel and transportation domain convinced the customer that it had found its perfect partner. Functional and technical experts carried out workshops at the customer location to understand detailed aspects of the existing system and its processes. Once the system was closely studied, our team came up with the best possible solution.

• Synchronize member profiles and manifest with iFly Loyalty to avoid discrepancies
• Seamless integration with other partner systems helped meet customer challenge.
• By way of thorough monitoring and proper solution of functional & non-functional requirements, we made it possible for the project to complete early within the agreed timelines which supported the customer's entry into Star Alliance network on time.
• Mechanisms to automatically exchange member, accrual and billing related files between the host airline and the other Star Alliance member airlines.
• Required integrations and standards were established for Star Upgrade Awards (SAUA) & Redemption

Key Features of the Implementation

• Membership management tool for customer profiling
• Self-service environment for members and partners
• Integrated communication modules like e-mail, SMS, fax, FTP, messaging (MQ), web services
• Rules Engine provides an easy way of adopting new business/industry drivers into your existing FFP
• Readymade interfaces that make customization easy
• Modular architecture ensures easy integration

Key Results

Through the successful implementation for the customer, IBS has enhanced its reputation as a service provider capable of delivering robust loyalty solutions with quality and before schedule.

• The customer benefited from a proven capability of iFly Loyalty as a sandwich model with seamless integration with other peripheral IT systems
• The robustness of the messaging & interfacing in iFly Loyalty, along with the reengineered process has allowed the Star Alliance partners to more efficiently interact with customer's existing loyalty system on everyday loyalty business transactions
• iFly Loyalty supported the customer to become Star Alliance compliant
• The platform was implemented in less than eight months and released to the airline for further UAT rounds, much ahead of the schedule
• The customer joined Star Alliance on time with a robust loyalty solution which interfaces with other IT systems