The airline has relied on its existing ERP consultant to migrate from a decade-old on-premises solution to a unified cloud-centric infrastructure
As a boutique airline, Bangkok Airways (“BA”) serves more than 12 domestic destinations; seven international destinations; owns and operates three airports; and in 2023, carried over 4.4m passengers.
Until November last year, the airline had been using on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to manage data for operational costs and profitability for almost a decade. However, in what BA considers a complete business transformation, the firm has migrated its ERP infrastructure to cloud computing — shifting from a scale-out to a scale-up model.
The transformation involves 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.
Now, since going “live” on the Cloud 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 greater visibility into 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.
Said BA’s Monpraon Sukroongreung, PhD, Senior Director (Corporate Information Technology): “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 passengers).”
According to Kulwipa Piyawattanametha, Managing Director, SAP (Indochina), BA’s ERP consultancy, BA 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.”
