Indeed, there are hundreds of ways of how to reduce IT spendings. For example, vendor streamlining, going for off-the-shelf products instead of in-house development, or license optimization, to name a few.
However, I’d like to showcase a probably unorthodox approach we executed with one of our airline clients with today’s blog post. An approach that helped this particular airline save considerable IT spendings based on the usage of our KPI solution.
This Is Not About Selling Our Product — But To Provide Some Unorthodox Thoughts On How To Reduce Cost At Your Airline.
However, this blog post’s intention is not about selling our product but to provide some unconventional thoughts on cost reduction that may help you too.
A Little Background First
To understand the approach, I will quickly give you some background on our KPI solution. With the aWall, we provide a solution that calculates airline operations KPIs in real-time. Displayed on large video walls and smartphones, the KPIs provide a comprehensive situational awareness to airline stakeholders. On-time performance, regularity, or misconnex quota are some prominent examples of KPIs we calculate with our solution. Depending on the airline, we calculate dozens of different KPIs.
Now, to calculate all this information, we connect our solution to different source systems. The operations control system, maintenance control system, or passenger service system are examples of our connected systems.
Accordingly, we collect a vast amount of an airline’s operational data. On top of that, we store the entire data to provide historical KPIs additionally. Therefore, we operate an entire data warehouse solution in the cloud. This is a very profound data warehouse solution used by some of the leading airlines in the world. Nevertheless, we’ve never promoted this part of our solution since we’ve considered that part of the KPI solution.
An Airline Struggling With Data Warehouse Cost — And Our Idea
However, one airline lately reported issues with its current data warehouse solution. So far, they have used an on-premise solution. Now, similar to many other IT systems, Corona exposed the disadvantages of on-premise nature. High fixed costs, reduced flexibility, limited scalability, and so on (oh, by the way, here’s an entire blog post about this topic).
During that discussion, we came up with using the warehouse contained in our KPI solution instead of their on-premise solution. The advantages have been quite evident:
- The warehouse already includes a considerable portion of available data
- Many source systems were already connected
- The solution is entirely cloud-based
Summarized, almost everything needed to use that part of our KPI solution as a central airline data warehouse was already available and working. And since our data warehouse solution offers the possibility to access data with 3rd party tools, like Tableau or PowerBI, the airline could directly start using it.
Probably The Most Effortless Cloud Migration Ever
So what’s the exciting part of this story? It is not about our KPI solution. Instead, it is about the fact that we collectively found an option that helped the airline to a) get rid of an on-premise solution b) use a scalable and flexible cloud solution — without a substantial effort.
Especially the financial benefits are evident for the airline:
- They can reduce fixed costs immediately and sustainably
- Possibility to rely on a flexible and scalable cloud cost model
- They could eliminate an entire system
- They reduced complexity
- And they reduced the number of interfaces
Altogether a very straightforward approach helps the airline to cost cuts. Additionally, they can now rely on a flexible setup perfectly adaptable to the upcoming and certainly challenging months.
What Are Your Thoughts?
Always happy to receive your input on topics. So make sure to send me an email or hit me up on Twitter.
