Air India accelerates its digital transformation journey by migrating its Enterprise Resource Planning system to RISE With SAP
Air India, India’s leading airline and a Star Alliance member, today announced the successful migration of its core Enterprise Resource Planning system using RISE With SAP, a tailor-made ERP software, bundled with transformation services, business analytics, and partner expertise that helps companies complete their personalised path to the cloud. This migration was a critical component in the larger digital transformation of Air India, with an impact on the modernization across business operations such as Finance and Human Resources as well as major functional areas such as Commercial, Operations, and Engineering.
One of the biggest challenges Air India faced in its comprehensive modernization journey was its outdated ERP system running on a decade-old mainframe and associated software. The migration and cutover of such critical systems is normally performed with backup and restore operations on an equivalent system. The unavailability of such a system anywhere in the world was a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Team Air India worked in close collaboration with SAP to devise innovative solutions and techniques to overcome the challenge and eventually delivering a successful migration ahead of schedule. This migration paves the way for further modernization of Air India’s ERP system and the combination of other Group airlines into one entity.
“Air India’s vision is to emerge as the world’s most technologically advanced airline. A critical and foundational capability for this is a highly reliable, scalable modern ERP system that will drive significant improvements to our operational efficiency and assist us in creating a delightful customer experience. We identified the migration of our ERP System to a modern cloud infrastructure as one of the most important steps in this transformation journey,” said Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Dr. Satya Ramaswamy. “We are glad to have completed this migration successfully, using a high level of creativity in overcoming the challenges that came our way. We are very grateful to the fantastic team from SAP that worked with us hand-in-hand to execute this transition flawlessly, and ahead of schedule.”
“Air India is one of the most iconic brands in the country, and we’re thrilled to deepen our long-standing partnership with them,” said Mr. Kulmeet Bawa, President & Managing Director, SAP Indian Subcontinent. “As they become a world-class airline and serve their global customers with a proud Indian heart, SAP’s cutting-edge cloud technology will enable the company to improve their customer experience, accelerate people transformation and develop into an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.”
