Bangkok Airways works with SAP, AWS and NTT DATA for digital transformation
Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited (BA) has leveraged RISE with SAP on AWS, and with NTT DATA Business Solutions as the implementation partner, to streamline maintenance efforts, lower costs, and improve scalability.
The partnership aims to future-proof the business and enable BA to become the best airline in Asia.
The airline had been using the on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions from SAP to manage data for operational costs and profitability for the past decade.
However, in its next phase of growth, BA needed a more flexible and scalable system to navigate fast-evolving market conditions and technological advancements in areas like generative AI (GenAI).
“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,” Bangkok Airways corporate IT senior director Monpraon Sukroongreung said.
“This was going to be enabled by our digital transformation in the cloud with our long-time partners, SAP, AWS, and NTT DATA Business Solutions,” Sukroongreung added.
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.
In doing so, BA adopted a “clean core” strategy to standardise ERP processes and data with minimal modifications, adding cloud-compliant extensions and customisations. This change was expected to streamline maintenance efforts, lower costs and improve scalability.
Since the cloud transition in November 2023, BA has experienced an uptick in system availability. Batch processing for its back-office operations and workflow automation are now centralized, providing visibility into BA’s business processes and real-time insights to enable data-driven decision-making.
Moreover, with the improved built-in disaster recovery capability, BA can reduce the risk of data loss and downtime, thereby enhancing system performance and reliability for customers, employees and stakeholders.
“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,” Sukroongreung shared.
According to Sukroongreung, business-critical reports that used to take days to generate can now be completed almost instantly, which enables BA to optimise their IT resource mobilisation.
“I am proud that our long-time customer, Bangkok Airways, selected RISE with SAP on AWS and is now benefiting from a unified cloud operating model,” SAP Indochina managing director Kulwipa Piyawattanametha said.
“That reduces complexities in its systems and improves visibility of flight performance and profitability, through a connected, central process and scalable digital core,” Piyawattanametha added.
