Bangkok Airways Takes Flight to the Cloud with RISE with SAP

A leading boutique airline in Asia, BA serves more than 12 domestic destinations, seven international destinations, owns and operates three airports, and in 2023, carried over 4.4 million passengers. BA is accelerating its digital transformation journey with RISE with SAP on AWS to future-proof its business, boost reliability and agility to stay competitive, and move closer to its goal of being the best airline in Asia.

“We can now effortlessly scale up our capabilities during peak periods and save on costs from greater efficiency. When we were on premises, our productivity was not great, but now we are seeing significantly reduced processing times. Business-critical reports that used to take days to generate can now be completed almost instantly. The improved performance is enabling us to optimize our IT resource mobilization, which in turn contributes to more efficient ground operations and a smoother experience for Bangkok Airways’ passengers,” said Monpraon Sukroongreung, Ph. D., Senior Director, Corporate Information Technology, Bangkok Airways.

The airline had been using the on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions from SAP to manage data for operational costs and profitability for almost a decade. For its next phase of growth, BA needed a more flexible and scalable system to navigate rapidly changing market conditions and technological advancements, particularly in areas like generative AI. “The pandemic disrupted the entire airline industry, and we were not spared. Amid the market volatility and unforeseen challenges, we knew we had to take a proactive approach to ensure that Bangkok Airways stayed resilient and would be operationally agile once the pandemic tided over. This was going to be enabled by our digital transformation in the cloud with our trusted long-time partners, SAP, AWS, and NTT DATA Business Solutions,” added Sukroongreung.

By moving to a cloud environment with RISE with SAP on AWS, BA began to transition its SAP ERP architecture from a scale-out to scale-up model – adopting a “clean core” strategy to standardize ERP processes and data with minimal modifications, and adding cloud-compliant extensions and customizations as its business evolves. This change was expected to streamline maintenance efforts, lower costs, and improve scalability.

Since going live on the cloud in November 2023, the airline has experienced a dramatic uptick in system availability. Batch processing for its back-office operations, and workflow automation, are now centralized, providing greater visibility into BA’s business processes across the organization and real-time insights that facilitate better data-driven decision-making. Furthermore, with improved disaster recovery capability built in right at the onset, BA is now able to reduce the risk of data loss and downtime, further improving system performance and reliability for customers, employees, and stakeholders.

“The past three years have accelerated the speed of change for many industries and the aviation sector was no exception, especially as demand for air travel rebounds following a challenging period. I am immensely proud that our long-time customer, Bangkok Airways, selected RISE with SAP on AWS and is now benefiting from a unified cloud operating model. That reduces complexities in its systems and improves visibility of flight performance and profitability, through a connected, central process and scalable digital core,” said Kulwipa Piyawattanametha, Managing Director, SAP Indochina.

“The robust ecosystem that SAP and AWS are a part of, also aligns well with our enterprise business requirements. As our business continues to scale and transform, we’ll be able to leverage the ecosystem for a broad range of services and solutions tailored to our needs,” said Sukroongreung.