Amadeus equipped to deliver on time - Chapman

M F Jabir

All tasks required for migrating into the Altea system were feasible and possible within 12 months and Amadeus had a track record of doing this scale of projects within that time frame,” said John Chapman Vice President, Airline Group, Amadeus Asia.

He told Daily News Business that in the fourth quarter of this year all the reservations and ticketing and inventory from the current system would be migrated to the new system and by the first quarter of 2014 all the Sri Lankan and Mihin Air airports would be migrated to the Altea system. He said the process would finish by early next year. “We are comfortable that we could do it in the given time. Amadeus has migrated 120 airlines to Altea platform.” He said the big part of the project was to train all the employees and a large part of employees were undergoing training.

He said,” we train the airline trainers and they train all the field staff. The other big task is integrating other systems of the airline.” He said typically the airline’s passenger services were the core and it had to feed information to all the other systems such as revenue accounting, revenue management and finance operations. Another big part is interfacing and the last big part of the project is data migration. Chapman said, “We have to take all the data from the current systems and migrate them into the Altea system.”

He said therefore the main tasks were staff training, system integration and data migration. “We are very comfortable that all that can be completed within12 months. A core project team of 30 or 40 from SriLankan side probably over 100 people and a similar number would be working from the Amadeus side including people doing training, people doing testing and people doing integration. From the Amadeus side we have a team doing data migration and we are looking at migrating reservation data, e-ticket records and also interfacing customer profiles.”

He said that by the first quarter of next year the airline would be fully on Altea and at that time SriLankan would be alliance compliant. He said that Amadeus possesses all the expertise required to be in oneworld and that was one of the selection criteria. “British Airways, Qantas, Cathay Pacific, Royal Jordanian and many other oneworld members were already on Altea,’ As soon as SriLankan has the system properly implemented they would be considered compliant and it would be just a case of turning on the connectivity with the partners. Hence as soon after Amadeus has completed the project, SriLankan would be alliance compliant,” he said.

Chapman added that the big part of joining the alliance was sharing customer data, sharing its availability, crew checking and baggage transferring. All those things would be very easy and possible when integrated in the same platform.