The Indian airline industry must join the Cloud party.
The pondering started because of a few conversations with folk working on setting up a surge MRO facility for Boeing, in Asia. Let us not talk about exactly where. The chat meandered to infrastructure, and eventually towards Cloud. As it is, though Cloud has become the norm in many other industries, aviation is a bit late to the party. Quick consideration of the symptoms seems to indicate that commercial operators in India may not even have seriously started.
Especially, given the current pandemic situation, this would be prudent time to shed some of the laggardness and migrate because of the rapid benefits that Cloud will bring. This is potentially a two part post, with this one listing the way cloud can transform the airline industry in India, and the second sketching out the transformed eco-system.
Here is a look at the way Cloud computing can help transform the industry, keeping in mind, that essentially, the Cloud connects, rapidly and easily. (Ramble alert – The list below, perhaps is long and not in a particular order.)
Strategy
Strategy, of course, operates at two levels, outward and inward facing. Let me consider the outward to revolve around Route Planning and go from there:
- Route Planning: Not just in normal times, but even now as airlines are re-starting their high density routes and cautiously adding the thin ones, the convergence of analyzed data from their own systems, related industry eco-system data generators and others continues to be a challenge. United, I remember, does take the data supported risks and retains some 80% odd of their started routes. Without the availability of converged data, airlines in India remain on the edge before picking up an “UDAN” station. Most of the larger operators, don’t. Of course, associated with route planning strategy are pricing, frequent flier dynamics, passenger demographics, load factors, yields, network design etc. leading to even fleet selection.
- Internal Planning: Planning solutions, if interconnected through the Cloud, and with use of analytics help predict interdependent outcomes for maintenance, crew, pricing, with direct impact on ROI, productivity and profitability
Operations
- The impact is deep on the supply chain in terms of parts either from internal stores or for procurement from the equipment (aircraft) manufacturer, or authorized third parties.
- Connectivity through the Cloud can enable quick access, for maintenance, to company based flight logs and knowledge databases (either company or manufacturer), safety directives (e.g. from Jeppesen, ForeFlight, DGCA, FAA etc.).
- The third type is from connected IoT devices which provide information, not only for preventive maintenance but also for optimization.
The ripple impact, in all these cases, is on flight operations.
Customer Experience
Not just in terms of self-service devices, but also seamlessly connect data from flight reservations, customer information and make it available across the eco-system, which today must include the health and airport authorities as well. Customer simulation (digital twinning) and analytics can sharpen operations to optimize aircraft turnaround, ground handling and surface movement.
Interconnectivity
Both into the technology eco-system and otherwise.
Recently, I saw a flight appear on Indigo’s web-site, while it took a while to appear on that of third party consolidators’. A substantial part of this interconnectivity will remain elusive and challenging unless technology moves from the legacy systems.
The migration quickly enables the use of analytics, taking advantage of ML / AI which often are an API, through the cloud, away. For instance, systems like Amadeus’ Airport Common Use System (ACUS), though not a new invention, enables airports, multiple airline Departure Control Systems (DCS), and other services to connect together seamlessly without any physical links.
Similarly, use of Blockchain, though some distance away, would ease up and accelerate the use of a potential eco-system for loyalty programs.
Business Continuity
- Disaster Recovery: The pandemic is the greatest possible teacher here. Being on the cloud would have allowed airlines not to miss a beat through the entire crises. Of course, the first some days of the lockdown was practically total operational shutdown. But, after that employee transport, handling etc. would have been less complex.
- Reliability: Legacy technology infrastructure has caused severe outages with airlines at airports (I remember United, BA as well as Indigo). After all, Cloud migration is perhaps one of the first things that one advises, for a Digital Transformation.
Carbon Friendliness
Removing computing power, servers, mini-data centers from the airports and other hubs translates directly into carbon savings. The other savings come from reduced travel of employees to the airport and other physical locations.
The bottom-line really is that a longer term Cloud strategy and its implementation can help the airline industry, in India, significantly. The question is, with Air India awaiting its sale, and the other airlines bleeding too, will they put in the money for Cloud? It just happens that this is exactly the time that they should have made the investment.
Meanwhile, should you be interested in how to take your organization to the Cloud, do write in to us. We, at 3nayan, can help with your Cloud Strategy, and also the implementation.
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