Transforming & Managing a High-Performance Network for Asia's Top 5 Fastest Growing Airlines

The growing presence & operations in region and expansion of customer base brought with it the following challenges: 

• The challenge of continued improvement in operational efficiency and performance as well as ensure customers have the best passenger experience. 
• They had an aged network infrastructure designed and implemented about a decade back – creating the need for transformation into a high-performance network creating a robust backbone for the operations.
• They were also going through a business transformation that required their operations to be split into different business entities.

The Customer is India’s largest airline by passengers carried topping at over 64 million and one of the fastest growing commercial fleets in Asia. They have rapidly grown since their inception in 2006 and over the last decade have started operations in almost all the 60+ airports across the country and have also expanded operations internationally in the South-East Asia region.

Addressing each of the customer’s three main challenges required a different approach. Setting up a state-of-the-art Centralized NOC which would become the epicenter of their operations was paramount. Due to compliance & regulatory requirements the NOC had to be setup in customer premises. We setup the NOC to ensure that the Mission Critical network connectivity for 65 + Airport & ATC sites with high availability networks complying to stringent SLAs for both LAN & WAN was implemented.

In parallel to setting up the Networks operations center and the streamlining & standardizing the service management processes, the transformation of the network was also undertaken. Two solutions were designed & deployed by Microland: One was the Fortinet based SD-WAN solution across all their 65+ Airport and Cargo sites – to ensure a fast configurable, scalable & secure WAN network.

The second transformation was upgrading their wireless networks across the airport sites from Ruckus based Wi-Fi to the Cisco based wireless network. This was undertaken to enhance the connectivity and performance of their Baggage Reconciliation System, which ensured that every passenger’s baggage is scanned & tagged through a handheld scanning device, to load and unload into the right aircraft at the right time from airlines central system. This has ensured that customer’s operations efficiency in baggage handling is now rated as the best in the country for delivering the right bag to the right passenger at the right airport.

Apart from these, there are a multitude of compliance requirements that needs to be met for the Airline industry. Microland implements projects for enhancements & deployments to address these changing compliance requirements.

Microland has been able to address and mitigate the challenges faced by the customer by:

• Allowing them to scale operations more efficiently due to the ongoing Covid-19 scenario when the passenger & aircraft traffic has been swinging like a wild pendulum. 
• Setting and managing of a wireless network that enhanced running of Baggage Tracking & Reconciliation System resulting in higher efficiency & passenger satisfaction.
• Running complete network operations across all their mission critical network infrastructure & meeting 99.99% network availability achievement round the year.