Flocking Together

AD times can make strange bedfellows of those who cannot see eye to eye otherwise. The Kingfisher-Jet alliance struck recently is an apt example. As the aviation industry in India bleeds and is estimated to close this financial year with cumulative losses of about Rs 8,000-9,000 crore (close to $2 billion) double the amount last year, alliances of this kind have become a necessity today.

“It (airline alliance) is nothing uncommon abroad,” says M Thiagarajan, managing director of Paramount Airways, a regional carrier that operates flights mainly in the south of India. “Alliances have been around for some time in the international market.”

Star Alliance, One world and SkyTeam, for instance, have been competing with each other globally over the last decade or so. The objective of these alliances is to provide a common pool of services to their members such as the use of common passenger terminals at airports, linking frequent flyer programmes and providing flights across member carriers.

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Air services unaffected but Kolkata grounded

The country-wide 12-hour strike call given by the central public sector trade unions left air services in the country largely unaffected.

The country's two busiest airports,New Delhi and Mumbai, were barely affected as they were privately run and had a contingency plan in place. The Kolkata airport was the worst affected with most international and domestic flights scheduled for take-off or landing on Wednesday either postponed or eventually cancelled.

Nearly 15,000 workers baggage handlers, cleaners and ground staff-at127 government-run airports walked off their jobs early Wednesday morning.

In Delhi, Airports Authority of India officials said going by the number of flights across the country, the schedules were running" almost normally".

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Flying high in testing times

In the aviation industry, characterised by intense competition and high cost structures, streamlining every aspect of operations to bring in efficiencies is a high priority. Improving management's visibility to operational and business performance is imperative to achieve this. It was this objective that drove Jet Airways to conduct a business process reengineering exercise and reimplement core backend modules of SAP and extend its footprint simultaneously. Jet Airways caters to both domestic and international routes.

The main challenge lay in improving business visibility and reducing delays in MIS. Project E3 (it stands for efficiency, empowerment and effectiveness) was executed to deliver information regarding the performance of all routes/flights flown by the airline taking into account the revenues and various costs incurred to the top management. It works by intricately integrating critical information into data models from various core modules of SAP and an in-house developed module for cost and revenue accounting system.

Jet Airways has an in house applications module for revenue accounting system and costing developed using FoxPro, which was outside the SAP environment. Related reports or MIS had to be manually fed into the SAP systems, which was integrated with FICO and Business Warehouse (BW) to generate MIS reports. RN Moorthy, senior general manager (IT), Jet Airways says, "We had to cull out the data from our legacy applications, feed it into R/3 and do budgeting to produce MIS reports. There was a lot of time delay in reconciling the data from disparate systems and it was error prone as it required manual intervention." He adds, "The delay could be anywhere between a week to ten days after the closure of the week. Our people had to burn midnight oil to dig into the reports; it was taxing on our bottom line."

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