Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 09 | Page 74

INDUSTRY WATCH this year, we introduced an advanced mobility solution for all our Ramp Supervisors and Team Leaders. The new solution enabled the workforce on the ramp and the terminal to communicate effectively, allocate tasks to personal, update status and perform other activities using handheld devices. Respective team managers can now view and monitor performance and progress on a real time basis. This has resulted in a more effective utilization of manpower, rationalizing costs and driving efficiency and quality of service in our ground handling operation. Business Intelligence: The BI platform & framework was launched about two years back and is constantly evolving. The initiative involves sourcing data from several systems within the airline and reporting on Executive level KPI’s and decision making parameters. With automated report generation and distribution facility and dashboards, this internally developed system has imbibed a culture of data driven decision making within the airline. In order to host and support such high performance systems, several projects were undertaken during the last 18-24 months in the area of IT infrastructure to leverage new technologies for high availability, scalability and redundancy of both data centre and data communication network. Can you give us the time scales behind the project(s) and the cost-factor involved for the implementation and maintenance? With the customer mobile-solution we spent about eight months to deploy the complete solution. However, interim releases were done, which also helped us to solicit and incorporate customer feedback and comments for next releases. Deployment of the EFB system took us about ten months. Majority of time was spent in overcoming challenges related to setting up the tool and 76 INTELLIGENTCIO THE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM WAS INNOVATIVE TO THE EXTENT THAT IT PROVIDES CLOSE TO REAL TIME DATA AND INFORMATION TO SENIOR EXECUTIVES OF THE AIRLINE. IT EQUIPS THEM TO BETTER CONTROL AND MANAGE OPERATIONS AND TAKE NECESSARY CORRECTIVE ACTIONS USING FACTS AND FIGURES www.intelligentcio.com