Air India Migrates Its Core ERP To RISE With SAP

Air India on Monday said it has migrated its core Enterprise Resource Planning system using RISE With SAP.

This migration for Air India is a critical component for its larger digital transformation, which would have an impact on the modernisation across its business operations such as Finance and Human Resources as well as major functional areas such as Commercial, Operations, and Engineering.

The airline faced one of its biggest challenges in the form of its outdated ERP system, which was running on a decade-old mainframe and associated software.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.

In a statement, Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Dr. Satya Ramaswamy said, “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.” 

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 paved the way for further modernisation of Air India’s ERP system and the combination of other Group airlines into one entity.

“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  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."