Europe Airpost Manages Business Intelligence Environment in Real Time with Engineered System
 
 

Europe Airpost Manages Business Intelligence Environment in Real Time with Engineered System

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A member of the ASL Aviation Group, Europe Airpost is the world’s largest operator of Boeing 737-300 Quick Change (convertible airplanes that transport freight by night and passengers during the day). With 800,000 passengers and 65,000 tons of freight transported in 2011, it is also the second-largest French airline and the leading French regional charter company.

Europe Airpost first deployed a business intelligence (BI) environment to optimize managing transport activities. It hosted this critical and resource-intensive application with other transactional business applications, such as flight pricing, payroll, and customer billing, on a common Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g infrastructure.

To ease access to business applications, such as the systems used for flight schedule management and aircraft maintenance, the company deployed Oracle Database Appliance to create a new, highly resilient, and dedicated business intelligence infrastructure.

With Oracle Database Appliance, Europe Airpost consolidated all critical business intelligence data regarding flight operation, fuel management, and service quality, while ensuring high performance and the availability of data and applications to efficiently manage its air transport activities. Thanks to a dedicated database appliance, business intelligence data is refreshed every 15 minutes instead of each hour, as with the previous infrastructure. As a result, operations managers can access aircraft mass reporting half an hour before each take off to optimize and to better calculate airport taxes for transported loads. Using Oracle Database Appliance, Europe Airpost has also optimized loading and query data performance by approximately 30%.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Europe Airpost

  • “Thanks to Oracle Database Appliance, we have a single, optimized hardware and software system for business intelligence. We can respond to numerous requests from technical services and maintenance staff about inventory tracking, and aircraft schedule forecasting, which improves our ability to maintain our fleet, monitor stock, plan plane schedules, and ensure efficient catering services.” – Francis Brisedoux, Database Administrator, Europe Airpost

  • Move the resource intensive business intelligence and data warehouse system to a dedicated server to optimize employees’ productivity through faster access to the transactional and business intelligence data used for flight schedule management, pricing, and plane maintenance
  • Create a single access point to business intelligence data from heterogeneous sources—including SQL requests, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Excel—and achieve a single reference point for all data to optimize managing cargo activity
  • Consolidate business intelligence and budget data to improve the efficiency of freight and passenger transportation activities
  • Deploy a scalable database solution that enables Europe Airpost to accommodate rapidly growing data volumes for its business intelligence environment by simply adding central processing unit (CPU), disk, and memory capacity

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Created a single, business intelligence data reference point by consolidating 15 databases into Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Edition, using Oracle Data Integrator, and facilated better access to homogeneous data
  • Implemented Oracle Database Appliance in just one day to host the Europe Airpost Business Intelligence application, Informatisation Décisionnelle d’Europe Airpost, known as IDEA
  • Improved cargo activities through a 25% to 30% faster flight-data loading process that incorporates calculations, such as for plane weight mass, flight plans, and fuel consumption into key performance indicators
  • Gained the ability to refresh plane weight mass and plane equalization data in near real time—approximately every 15 minutes—compared to one hour previously, enabling airports to accurately calculate taxes on transported loads, and for Europe Airpost to reduce fuel consumption
  • Enabled operations managers to obtain an overall view of all planes at any given time on their desktops through a Web interface to better manage fleet use, service quality, fuel demand, and crew schedules,
  • Guaranteed high availability of a critical business intelligence application used to manage a 24/7 schedule of passenger and freight transport activity, through a 100% active/active cluster architecture, integrated into Oracle Database Appliance
  • Used Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to automatically generate a ticket, should a problem arise, without any additional costs, to reduce administration charges
  • Integrated Oracle Essbase with Oracle Database Appliance to produce accurate financial and budgetary reporting and to provide a strategic vision of transportation activity to key managers

Why Oracle

“We found that Oracle Database Appliance was the leading solution on the market, offering the best quality and value,” said Francis Brisedoux, database administrator, Europe Airpost.

“The flexibility of the Oracle solution’s pay-as-you-grow model and its ability to easily upgrade hardware components—including central processing units and memory—enables us to efficiently respond to business requests for delivering new interfaces for tracking flight schedules, parts inventories, and airplane lifecycles.”

Implementation Process

Europe Airpost worked with Oracle Support to optimize the roll out of Oracle Database Appliance and achieve performance gains on data loading and reporting processes. Thanks to this optimization, the company deployed Oracle Database Appliance in just one day, including connections, electrical power, and cabling operations.

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