TIBCO Software > Case Studies > Scandinavian Airline Service Flies High with TIBCO

Scandinavian Airline Service Flies High with TIBCO

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

Sweden

Product

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™
ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™
TIBCO® Managed File Transfer

Tech Stack

Enterprise Service Bus
Service-Oriented Architecture
Real-Time Messaging

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

Applicable Industries

Transportation

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Logistics & Transportation

Use Cases

Fleet Management
Predictive Maintenance
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

SAS is Scandinavia’s leading airline. Its vision is to make life easier for Scandinavia´s frequent travelers. With SAS you become part of a community experiencing easy, joyful, and reliable services, delivered the Scandinavian way. Its strategic priorities are to keep up with trends and industry developments, ensure competitiveness, and provide the prerequisites for long-term sustainable profitability.

The Challenge

As Katarina Khan, head of enterprise architecture, explains, “Over the last 20 years, the airline industry has evolved from a system of long-established, state-owned carriers to a dynamic free-market industry. There are a lot of low-cost airlines now, and for passengers, it’s become very much about a digital experience—self-service apps for booking, re-booking, and flight updates. “Back in 2001, our challenge was to move away from old point-to-point integrations and become more loosely coupled—to reuse integrations and have a very reliable, secure, high-performing infrastructure. We wanted to give the business a shorter time to market and make it easy to integrate with partners and communicate with our customers in a modern way. If we didn’t modernize, it would have been very difficult to deploy new solutions to meet customer demand.”

The Solution

Continues Ms. Khan, “In 2001—this was before my time—we did an evaluation, and the choice obviously was TIBCO. I think our goal from the beginning didn’t change that much, we just decided to implement in phases, and started with TIBCO’s enterprise service bus. In the second phase, around 2006, we implemented a new co-management system, which required a lot of integrations and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™. We wanted a more service-oriented architecture so that every time a flight takes off, a message would be sent to backend systems. The next major phase was around 2010 when we decommissioned our old homegrown system for modern ticketing, reservation, inventory-management, and departure-control systems. At that time, we did a new evaluation because we had a lot of Microsoft technology, so we actually compared TIBCO with Microsoft and decided to keep and expand TIBCO. After that, we invested more in our integration platform using ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ and TIBCO® Managed File Transfer, which was a good way to control our batch FTP and SFTP jobs. TIBCO had a very important role as a data hub to create these integrations from one system to all our backend systems. At the end of this program, we also established our integration competency center, the ICC.

Operational Impact

The integration platform was again very important in 2013 through 2014 when we had a huge project to change our main supplier for system operation and maintenance. During the transition to the new vendor, we moved very smoothly rerouting the integrations to each application. For us, the stability and reliability of this platform is key. We trust TIBCO. Our integration platform is central to our infrastructure environment.
Our web app for 24/7 passenger check-in is an example of functionality enabled by the integration platform. Also, for the in-flight management system, there are a lot of messages that need to go through many processes and many systems. Real-time messaging allows us to have an overall smooth flight operation.
It’s much easier for us to re-use services and messages now. It’s difficult to say how much we reuse, but our goal is at least 50%. We document integration specifications so we can see what we have, which helps when new requirements come in. The ICC supports all the projects and provides shared integration services. Because they are experts in this area, they maintain the platform. They have a very good understanding of all our implementations.
We started in phases, and we are still working in phases. We will soon implement a new flight schedule distribution tool, and we can re-use integrations from earlier implementations.
We wanted to reduce project delivery times. We saw that if we had a dedicated integration team that really knew the products and could help with integration, we would decrease integrations across the enterprise and eliminate business silos. We reduce project delays because we support clients with re-use. We can quickly roll out a new integration to onboard a partner and get to market faster. When we are decommissioning an old system and introducing a new system or a new partner, the preferred choice is always our integration platform.

Quantitative Benefit