Bangkok Airways (BA) has chosen RISE with SAP, a complete business transformation offering of cloud solutions, infrastructure, and services, to improve operational efficiency and adaptability, gain competitive advantage through cutting-edge technologies, and transform IT resource management.
The boutique airline serves more than 12 domestic destinations, seven international destinations, owns and operates three airports, and in 2023, carried over 4.4 million passengers.
BA is accelerating its digital transformation journey with RISE with SAP on AWS to future-proof its business, boost reliability and agility to stay competitive, and move closer to its goal of being the best airline in Asia.
“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,” said Monpraon Sukroongreung, senior director of corporate IT at Bangkok Airways.
“Business-critical reports that used to take days to generate can now be completed almost instantly,” she said. “The improved performance is enabling us to optimise our IT resource mobilisation, which in turn contributes to more efficient ground operations and a smoother experience for Bangkok Airways’ passengers.”
The airline had been using the on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions from SAP to manage data for operational costs and profitability for almost a decade. For its next phase of growth, BA needed a more flexible and scalable system to navigate rapidly changing market conditions and technological advancements, particularly in areas like generative AI.
“Amid the market volatility and unforeseen challenges, we knew we had to take a proactive approach to ensure that Bangkok Airways stayed resilient and would be operationally agile once the pandemic tided over. This was going to be enabled by our digital transformation in the cloud with our trusted long-time partners, SAP, AWS, and NTT DATA Business Solutions,” added Sukroongreung.
By moving to a cloud environment with RISE with SAP on AWS, BA began to transition its SAP ERP architecture from a scale-out to scale-up model –- adopting a “clean core” strategy to standardise ERP processes and data with minimal modifications, and adding cloud-compliant extensions and customisations as its business evolves. This change was expected to streamline maintenance efforts, lower costs, and improve scalability.
Since going live on the cloud in November 2023, the airline has experienced an uptick in system availability. Batch processing for its back-office operations, and workflow automation, are now centralised, providing greater visibility into BA’s business processes across the organisation and real-time insights that facilitate better data-driven decision-making.
Further, 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.
“The past three years have accelerated the speed of change for many industries and the aviation sector was no exception, especially as demand for air travel rebounds following a challenging period,” said Kulwipa Piyawattanametha, managing director of SAP Indochina.
