Talk
Transformation of an airline operations model at Transavia (Air France KLM)
Thursday, June 9
15:00 – 15:45
Lecture Room
Rijk van Vulpen
Enterprise Designer, Trivento Spark!
The design challenge
Transavia The Netherlands (a AirFrance KLM subsidiary) asked us, as an initial brief, to help rationalize their operational applications and IT landscape. The real underlying issue was to help design a new airline operations model. With the mission to out-operate the competition and drive down costs through digital.
The strategic design dialogue
During a two year and still ongoing effort awareness grew bottom up from application architecture to digital strategy to business architecture. The people involved grew from information managers to cio to vice presidents of commerce and operation. Most important assets in this dialogue were models. Models of current and future state. These models gave the insights that brought the courage to take bold steps. First in replacing the 30 year old application in the heart of the application landscape. Taking supposedly impossible hurdles freed up new dreams and brought self esteem. And made for a digital strategy, resulting in digitally empowered employees, brought about through agile processes. And from that the operations VPs and all personnel joined in for an operations transformation.
Solution & target state
In the first stages application rationalization roadmaps and blueprints gave insight into a stage that could be reached in 2018. This drove both reduction of technical debt and innovation efforts. In the later stage, using the new Transavia brand identity, we operationalized the brand promise and created journeys for cabin and cockpit crew, airport handlers and technicians and create step by step the transavia employee interaction platform. First we introduced tablets and apps for flight preparation, inflight sales and service support and postflight debriefing. But more and more we work on holistic processes with distributed control and collaboration, 360 degree flight progress and scenario based exception handling. But most of all, we transformed from a controlled, siloed and reactive style to a more networked, holistic and scenario based style of organization.
The results
The start in 2014 was slow and tiny, but month after month, speed grew. Simultanous introduction of agile and lean ways of operating helped the change to get traction and IT and business to join forces. The “best digital airline” efforts help in both the results and cost per available seat kilometres and in growth of the company.