Amadeus has announced that following a flawless migration process, Lufthansa has become the first member carrier to cut over to the inventory management module of the Star Alliance Common IT Platform (CITP). The new system is based on Amadeus’ new generation Altéa Inventory solution.

Several hundred professionals from Amadeus, Lufthansa and its partners, were involved in the five-phase migration process. During the same, all inventory control and 700,000 flight schedules for the entire Lufthansa route network were smoothly migrated and published to all systems, worldwide, in which Lufthansa flights can be booked. An additional 40 existing Lufthansa applications were also adapted in advance, to facilitate the cutover.

 

According to Hans Jorgensen, Amadeus Vice President, Strategic Airline & Partner Programmes, the new generation technology system allows an airline to better manage its entire inventory and pricing, flight schedules, seat planning and passenger re-accommodation needs, in a way that is fully integrated with the airline’s sales and check-in platforms.

 

“This is an incredibly rich tool for normal operations but becomes critically important when the user airline needs to handle situations such as flight disruptions for diverse reasons. It brings an airline significantly improved decision making capabilities. This also enables it to reduce operational costs through modern IT processes.”

                 

To optimise data exchange between the new system and existing client applications, Lufthansa has also pioneered the use of the Amadeus product suite’s service-oriented-architecture (SOA) in the airline industry. The latter allows interaction required between the Altéa components and other vital airline applications - such as the data warehouse - to take place in a perfectly structured manner. To achieve this, a middleware IT solution, provided by a Lufthansa partner, has been put in place to provide a structured flow of information between the Altéa Reservation and Altéa Inventory systems and 40 of the airline’s client applications. This results in constant and full, real-time integration, as well as seamless data transfer with the targeted systems, by channeling them through a single hub. This structure eliminates the previous costly and complex need to build myriad spaghetti-like connections in the host system to achieve the same functionality.

 

“Migration to the new inventory system was incredibly smooth and seamless to the end-user,” said Christoph Ganswindt, Senior Vice President and CIO, Lufthansa Passenger Airlines.  “Collaboration between the teams at Amadeus and Lufthansa was a crucial factor in the on-time and successful delivery of the project.”

 

“The successful migration to the new Inventory module is a significant step in the implementation of the Star Alliance CITP. This achievement provides a foundation for our members planning the migration to CITP in the near future as well as for those members who are considering CITP” commented, Aman Khan, Vice President and CIO of Star Alliance.
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