Synopsis
The client approached Coforge to develop, enhance and maintain their ground operations. With an ageing and multiple technology stacks, inflexible architecture, inefficient processes, and multiple ITSM tools, the client required a partner who could streamline the process. With its vast experience and knowledge of the aviation industry, Coforge designed and developed applications that helped the client streamline processes, increase the efficiency of a number of ground operation processes, including baggage management and ground crew management.
About the client
The client is one of the largest airlines in Australia, operating flights on both, domestic and international sectors.
Business Challenge
The client was looking to improve their ground operations to manage passenger baggage collection and check-in, ground crew management, flight information displays, etc. Challenges faced by the client in the cargo area:
- Legacy Technology Stack
- Architecture / Infrastructure improvements
- Support processes were not streamlined
- Different ITSM tools used in different locations
- Multiple technology stack – Applications in different technologies
Our Solution
Coforge was responsible for the development, enhancement, and maintenance of the Hermes and Shift Logic applications. Coforge contributed to the improvement and maintenance of the client’s ground operations in the following areas:
Bag Drop Assistant
Coforge developed a web application to assist airline staff with passenger bag check-in/activation. This app allowed passengers to scan their boarding passes and bag tags printed from the airport kiosk. The main functionality involved scanning boarding passes to retrieve passenger and baggage details, scanning and activating Bag Tag, and waiving payments for overweight bags.
Hermes
Hermes is the ground station that receives messages from ACARS-enabled aircraft. It also acts as a middleware application that receives messages from various sources and routes them to other systems. Hermes acts as a message broker between different systems, including ACARS - enabled aircraft. It is, therefore, dependent on upstream systems sending messages to process.
Coforge maintains and upgrades the app with new versions, adding and maintaining connectors for new upstream/downstream applications, and create and maintain users for the Hermes application.
Shift Logic
Shift Logic is an application used to create and control rosters for the ground crew on 24*7 rotating shifts. The use of this app reduced scheduling time significantly.
Coforge was responsible for maintaining and updating the app, adding new functions when applicable. Coforge has also enabled integrations with external systems like payroll. Currently, a monthly roster for the staff is generated within a few hours.
Gate Operations Planning System (GOPS)
GOPS (Ground Operations Planning System) is a visual bay planning system that assists with the bay planning for all mainline airports and other airports with multiple aircraft departures. With information from a Station Activity Report (SAR) or various Sabre reports, GOPS can generate manageable layouts such as bay plans and movement sheets and export gate information into iFIDS.
Coforge was responsible for developing, enhancing, and maintaining the application:
- Upgrading and fixing issues that arise from the use of the application
- Bay planning and gate allocation and exporting gate information to relevant downstream applications
- Export gate information to relevant downstream applications
- Maintaining and enhancing the CBR application
iFIDS
iFIDS is the flight information display system used at airports by GCC and AMCO, and other ground operations staff. It provides the latest arrival/departure information and port movement information for flights.
Coforge is involved with end-to-end maintenance and support of the application and custom development of the new functionality of iFIDS. We are also responsible for updating the STD/ETD/DELAY PORT/aircraft fuel information by GCC and AMCO.
Crew Briefing Report
The Crew Briefing Report (CBR) available on the intranet retrieves duty information from the Sabre database for the crew on a particular date. The main users of this system are crew members and CBR Admin.
Coforge maintains, enhances, and upgrades this CBR application.
Delivering more Value
Coforge provides the following benefits to the client:
- Reducing monthly roster for staff from days to within a few hours. Maintaining and upgrading applications
- Resolving user issues
- End-to-end maintenance and support of the application
- Custom development of new functionality of iFIDS
