Emirates Flight Catering Experiences Growth with JD Edwards

Challenges

• Ensure efficient 24/7 operations in a very time-sensitive environment where meals must be ready four hours before the departure of each flight
• Ensure precise material planning despite very strict timelines, with the planning for catering each flight’s hot food, cold food, bakery, and beverages starting four days before departure by defining the bill of materials and work orders involved
• Achieve an operating uptime that exceeds 99% to ensure timely food and beverage delivery
• Handle unit-of-measurement conversions for inventory items efficiently throughout the entire supply chain—such as for mineral water, which the company buys in boxes, stores in bottles, and serves in glasses
• Allow for batch reports from finance, inventory, purchasing, and other areas to be generated after midnight, despite the substantial amount of system resources they consume

Solutions

• Upgraded Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to achieve operating uptime that exceeded 99% to ensure timely food and beverage deliveries to airplanes—even beyond the requirements of the flight catering business, where an airplane can never be delayed because the food is not delivered in time
• Reduced food cost variances (the monetary equivalent of losing raw material on its way through the manufacturing chain due, for example, to insufficient quality of the supplied raw material) from US$500,000 down to US$100,000 per month, to realize a straight gain of US$4.8 million per year
• Achieved a perfect balance between system load and system response to enable the company to generate numerous batch reports after midnight—even though most of the flights it caters depart between midnight and 6 a.m., requiring proper system response to produce catering orders and checklists for crew sign-offs
• Enabled the company to efficiently handle complex unit-of-measurement conversions for inventory items throughout the entire supply chain (for example, fresh fish, which is purchased in kilograms, transferred from the warehouse to the cooking department in pieces, and calculated on finished goods bill of materials in grams) without any customizations
• Enabled more efficient, 24/7 operations for reorder planning by generating automatic purchase requisitions—which can be accepted or rejected by managers—if stock falls below the minimum level
• Enabled more efficient material requirements planning by automatically checking all bills of materials, generating the required twice-daily requisitions to fulfill customer orders, and transferring materials from the main warehouse to the cooking department
• Accommodated a growth path from 45,000 meals per day and 3,000 employees in 2006 to 125,000 to 150,000 meals per day and 6,700 employees today

Why Oracle

“We view Oracle as part of the extended team and not as just a vendor. The tight integration and hands on approach taken by Oracle ensured success after success. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne handled the difficult challenge of unit-of-measurement conversions, which could not be handled by any other ERP system,” said Arun Tewary, vice president, IT, and chief information officer, Emirates Flight Catering.

Implementation Process

Emirates Flight Catering chose to employ a three-phased approach. In the first phase—a thorough overview and analysis of its existing hardware—Emirates Flight Catering decided to upgrade its disk space, central processing units, and system memory.

Phase two consisted of upgrading the existing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne system to version 9.0, carrying over all customizations that the company had implemented it its previous version. Now in the third phase—Business Process Validation—the company is identifying areas for improvement.

Resources

• Emirates Flight Catering Defeats Challenges with JD Edwards
• Emirates Flight Catering Reduces Invoicing Time by 60% and Achieves Greater Control of Stock