Carmen System Implementation
Finnair is one of the most innovative, safest and longest-operating airlines in the world. Finnair’s route network connects Asia, North America and the northern regions of Europe and beyond through its hub at Helsinki Airport. The company employs approximately 4,800 professionals and its revenue in 2014 was approximately 2.3 billion euros.
To achieve Finnair’s growth ambitions, Finnair decided to start implementing the Carmen Rostering optimizing system. The system would replace manual rostering work, thereby minimizing planning time and increasing planning cost-efficiency. Finnair turned to Type 2 Solutions with the request of providing the integration services for this project.
T2S Delivered Solid Integration Solution
“ We identified integration as being one of the most serious risks of the initial Carmen implementation at Finnair. Type 2 Solutions embraced these risks, and delivered a solid integration solution, thereby contributing to the timely completion of the project. Beside the technical integration, Type 2 Solutions provided valuable input during the process integration part of the project. Together with Carmen systems they played a significant role in re-engineering our planning process. ”
Full Data Set Transport
Right from the start, it appeared that the feasibility of integration with Finnair’s planning and tracking systems would be decisive for the success of the Carmen implementation. The capability to transport data not only from Finnair’s systems to Carmen, but, more importantly, from Carmen back to Finnair’s systems, would be crucial to making the project a success.
Next to the fact that full data set transports had never been attempted before on Finnair’s systems (in fact, the only transports were queue interfaces trickling changes), the absence of accurate technical documentation and reluctance of the software vendor to share structural information on the system were major challenges that characterized this project.
Project Details
- Transport data from Finnair's systems to Carmen and back
- Local built system saved time and money
- Perfected bulk load procedure to fit the entire upload process
- Entire upload completed within limited time window
Saving Time and Money
The project started with a survey of the data structures of the system and an examination of the overall data quality. To demonstrate to Finnair management that rosters could successfully be created in the system outside of the normal transactional operations performed by the software itself, Type2Solutions built a local version of the system.
While the first priority was to deliver usable live information for the Carmen system to fine-tune its optimization rules on, the transport back into the Finnair system had to be started right away as well. At the same time, the bulk load procedure into the back-end database needed to be perfected in order to fit the entire upload process into the limited time window in which systems at Finnair would be allowed to be down.
The local system proved to be an excellent tool during this project, saving a substantial amount of time and money that would normally have been spent on communicating back and forth with Finnair’s outsourced infrastructure provider concerning database handling (backups, restores, etc.). After about a year, first optimized cabin rosters issued by Carmen Rostering were successfully loaded into the production systems at Finnair.
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Data Migration Management
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